When he opened the door at the top of the staircase, the Brothers had already taken their places around the edges of the circular room. They watched him enter with eager anticipation, eyes wide, fingers tightly clutching or caressing in readiness their chosen talismans of daggers and gems and irrelevant trinkets. A few of them exchanged curious glances when the two amarach—each at least a foot taller than Torrahs himself—stepped through the doorway behind him, but no one said a thing. They’d learned that much, at least.
To his surprise, the woman-child Dehlyn had already given way to the green-eyed vessel within her body. She now stared at him with a surprising serenity, which felt far more as though she were there as an accomplice to his plan tonight and not the victim of it. He wondered just how much she knew and why she made no attempt to stop him. Perhaps she suspected his new strategy would gain him nothing; perhaps she already knew there was nothing in her power to change the course of this night. Either way, it did not matter now.
Taking his place just inside the circle of gathered Brothers, Torrahs returned the vessel’s gaze. “Go to her,” he commanded, and the amarach behind him did as they were told.
The female Haela’s shift rustled against her legs when she walked, though neither she nor the red-haired giant of an immortal made any other sound. Their bare feet padded with an eerie silence against the dusty stone floor, and when they reached the green-eyed Dehlyn strapped to the chair with the iron manacles, they both fell to their knees beside her.
Silently, lovingly, as if each of them were her children asking for forgiveness, the vessel glanced at first Haela and then Rofaer. “You’ve done well,” Dehlyn said. The amarach raised their heads to meet her gaze; it seemed they had either received whatever benediction they sought from her or had managed to communicate in some form Torrahs did not yet recognize. He still had not lifted his command on the immortals to entreat with no one but himself, and the fact that they managed to respond to the vessel with this simple act of looking at her antagonized his wariness.
“Stand behind her,” he said, lifting his voice to its full volume in the tower without letting his irritation slip into it. The amarach obeyed. “Each of you place a hand upon her shoulder. Do not remove it.” Again, they followed his order. Their movements remained slow and fluid despite the silent fury burning behind Rofaer’s eyes and the tears streaming from Haela’s. The vessel did not respond to their touch, sitting straight-backed in the wooden chair, her green eyes glowing. She stared at Torrahs with far less expression than he’d ever seen upon her—neither the ancient, weary sadness nor the spurned wrath of a being far older and wiser than he. The Wanderer did not break her gaze when he shouted to the Brothers, “Begin!”
The change made itself apparent almost immediately. When the first conjured spell streaked cross the small room of the tower and pummeled the vessel’s shoulder, they all felt it—a hot, painful buzz filling the very air around them. In that split second between the first attack and the dozens of others that followed it, the room hummed with some electric force, as if both lightning had struck within the tower and all the air had been sucked from it. Then time returned to its natural form, nearly impossible to fathom, and the tower lit with flashes of silver, purple, and green.
The Brotherhood aimed their practiced forces of compulsion and destruction at both vessel and amarach alike. Dehlyn’s body writhed within the chair under such a brutal attack, with no time to cry out, scream, or sob between the blows she suffered. The amarach beside her stood their ground, held by the bond Torrahs claimed over each. A few grunts escaped them when the Brothers’ much improved incantations delivered physical damage, though the tower had grown too full with the rising clamor to hear such weak protests—two dozen men shouting the words they’d etched into their minds for just such a purpose.
Torrahs focused his own power, aiming his staff and the summonings it produced at the vessel’s chest and head. He felt his own mouth pulled into a tight grimace of victory as he shouted the words, finding himself unable to stop the wrath of his own eagerness when the world seemed to tilt on its side, expanding and splitting all at once. A sharp pain cut at his temples and beneath his palm tightly clutching the staff. Then a new flare of energy and terrible vigor flowed through him, coming from the vessel and the two doomed amarach at her side—from his fingertips and the words released with his own breath. This new force filled his body enough to make him think he might burst. And still, the Wanderer and the Brotherhood pressed on.
The immortal beings tried to withstand it all; that much was quite obvious. They staggered against the weight of whatever new force their attackers had released, lifting their heads with staggering difficulty, as if they fought against invisible hands forcing them down toward the ground. The room shook. All of existence shook. The amarach trembled, the vessel bucked against her restraints, and the chair holding the vessel shuddered. The wood floor beneath it groaned then splintered, sending up sawdust and ragged slivers. The stone walls trembled around them, splitting at the far end of the tower and sending a jagged crack toward the ceiling before a sheet of dust rained down upon the agonized victims.
Surprising Torrahs most of all, in the end, was the amarach’s bond with each other. In a moment of knowing, ignoring the flashing blasts of heightened power hitting every part of their immortal flesh, Haela and Rofaer turned slowly to glance at each other, their hands still rigidly outstretched to grip the vessel’s shoulder. Haela’s tawny hair billowed around her head, her cheeks glistening with unending tears. For the first time, Torrahs saw the red-haired amarach smile. Rofaer’s face lit with a maddened grin, as if he now tasted a victory soon to be claimed, his gaze never wavering from his companion’s. The sight of it filled Torrahs with a foreboding he did not understand, and his confidence faltered for only a moment. Then he merely resumed his fervent attempts and shouted his spells even louder.
In his last act of defiance, Rofaer lifted his fiery wings and spread them to their full, fearsome span. Their bright colors sliced through the magic-thickened air as sharply as drawn weapons, the force of it falling upon Torrahs’ ears like a thick blanket whipping in a storm. Then both amarach were consumed in a violently bright burst of golden light—nothing like the blinding white that took them away from the mortal realm or the flashes of hot, intense spells streaking from the men lining the room. This was the immortals’ lifeforce, their undoing, their demise.
Torrahs thought for a moment that he saw the red-haired amarach’s bright, extended wings blazing with true flames before both amarach shattered. The gold light of their essence disappeared as quickly as it had bloomed, leaving behind nothing but a few shimmering particles and two red, singed feathers wafting down to the splintered floor.
THE SUN HAD LONG SINCE fallen into darkness, even here in a place that had appeared where there should have been nothing but cold air dropping away to the frozen river at the bottom of the gorge. But some inner glow still remained in this clearing, lighting it enough without starlight or flame so they could all still see each other. Kherron did not know the point of his story in which he’d risen from the ground beside Aelis to stand among the clanning. When he’d relayed in vivid detail the torment of his forty-eight deaths in the violet realm the Nateru called the void—which seemed far more appropriate here than during the hours he and Aelis had spent alone in each other’s arms—he realized he’d gotten to his feet. Now, he gazed down at the faces upturned to listen to his tale, finding awe and respect on some of them and cautious, restrained pain on others.
“I cannot tell any of you what to do,” he said, trying to conclude the tale he had not anticipated sharing so they would understand his reasoning. “And I am hardly the person to make any kind of decision for you, Blood of the Veil or not. I wish I were. But I’ve made my choice.”
“Choices can be unmade,” said the tiny, rail-thin woman.
“No one’s mind is stone, Kherron,” said the man in grey who had been a bird. “Not even a Blood of the
Veil’s mind.” This elicited a few smirks from the gathered humans, though the jest eluded Kherron completely. “You are allowed to decide differently when new circumstances present themselves.”
“New circumstances?” Kherron nearly scoffed, fighting not to shout his defiance. “What new circumstances could possibly make me change my mind?”
The ground beneath them shuddered, making him instantly regret his words, though they could not possibly have been the cause of such a tremor. In an instant, the gathered peace of the clanning erupted into chaos; shrieks and animalistic growls shattered the silence, punctuated by roars, squawking, low moans, and screams from human throats. The world around them shook and rocked, very much as it had when Kherron had taken those first tentative, ignorant steps within the realm of purple mist.
Kherron stumbled and dropped to his knees, supporting himself with his arms so as to keep his face from meeting the soft earth beneath him. The Nateru around him struggled violently against this unknown assault. The two deer tossed their heads in apparent agony, stamping the ground where the man beside them blinked back and forth between his human form and that of a squirrel. A bullfrog bloomed into what looked like a young girl, who merely squatted where she was and stared at the disorder with wide eyes. Birds took flight, some of them remaining airborne to fly over the top of the forest and out of sight, while others dropped heavily from the sky in forms without wings.
So many of them changed their shapes and sizes with such violent frequency, Kherron could not keep track of how many Nateru still remained or what previous form they’d inhabited upon his meeting them. The earth groaned beneath his fingertips, calling out to Kherron in pain and fear and helplessness. The cry was so real and so loud—blistering up from the soil and into his fingers, thrumming through his blood and every particle of his being—that he longed to make it stop. It seemed every creature here and elsewhere, pummeled by this unknown attack upon the foundations of the earth itself, called out to him for aid. He did not know what to do with such pain and terror, and the only thought he could grasp amidst the confusion was to reach out and open the doorway.
The instant silence was nearly deafening. Kherron’s heart pounded in his head, battling his harsh, rapid breath for the only sound in this place between his own realm and the void. From his hands and knees, he gazed out over the scattered clanning; every creature had now frozen in tremors of anguish, bucking in half-transformed shapes of man and beast or suspended mid-air as multiple creatures in uncompleted shifting. Slowly, Kherron turned his head to look at Aelis beside him. It struck him with shame that he had not thought to see to her first amidst the turmoil, and a low moan of despair escaped his throat at the sight of her.
She too had fallen to her hands and knees, a sharp grimace of pain and fear contorting her face. Eyes wide, she clutched at the soft grass and dirt beneath her, her hands half-elongated with two-inch claws of dirty white. The hair frozen around her face retained its fiery color, but where it fell across her back and over the bearskin cloak, the red gave way to a deep, earthy brown. Her cloak itself seemed not to be entirely a cloak anymore; instead of draping over her to fall to the ground where she crouched, it wrapped itself around her shoulders and waist, clinging to her arms and legs like a poorly tailored robe. Even in the latent dullness of the doorway, the bearskin cloak had taken on a life of its own; Kherron imagined that merely breathing on it would set the thick sable hairs rippling in such a way that Aelis would now feel it.
His fingers still throbbed with a dull ache from where they dug into the earth, but the terror and the pain he’d felt that were not his own came to him now as a muted echo. He’d meant only to allow himself a moment unaffected within the doorway to think—some borrowed time in a place where the obedience of its laws did not exist. And he had entirely expected to be alone here.
“Kherron.”
When he heard the voice, a terrible tremor of both longing and disgust ran through him. Able to react far more swiftly to this than to the inexplicable undoing of the clanning, Kherron launched to his feet and turned around, putting the half-bear Aelis behind him. He would do whatever he could to protect her, though he did not know why he felt the need to shield her when he’d already known to whom that voice belonged.
Dehlyn stood before him in the doorway of the violet-misted realm, her green eyes glowing in the muted light. The strength of such joy in her smile—set against the terrible sadness behind her eyes—brought a sharp, painful ache to Kherron’s heart and a turn of nausea in his gut. He seemed unable to quell the raging tides of conflicting emotions at the sight of her; he had not seen her as herself in so very long, and yet this woman had bent him to her will without so much as a second thought to his humanity or the lives he’d destroyed in his desperation to obey her command.
“What do you want?” The words rumbled out of him as if he meant to use them as a weapon. Kherron did not know whether or not he wanted her to hear the anguish behind them or the spite he’d harbored for her since releasing himself from the void. The thought now that that place lay so much closer again—just beyond this muted doorway—brought a brief image of pushing Dehlyn through it before shame consumed him again.
Her smile flickered. “I want you, Kherron.” When he clenched his fists, she raised a hand to stop him from speaking. “But that will never be. I... I felt you cut me out.”
“You tried to own me.” Kherron dipped his head, studying her from behind his lowered brow. At the same time, he both hoped for a satisfying explanation and wished she’d never shown herself here. “I would have come for you anyways.” He could not tell her he loved her; he had, once, but he could no longer separate that feeling from the vow she’d siphoned out of him. Whatever the truth, he had left it behind in the void.
Dehlyn gave a single, slow nod and closed her eyes. “I know. I did not see it then. I only saw...” She took a shuddering breath. “I only saw you pull away from me, and I wished so terribly to believe I could change that vision.” Clasping her hands together, she looked up at him again. “I see so very little now, Kherron, but the end is clear as day.”
His heart nearly leapt into his throat when the powerful truth behind her words hit him like a physical blow. The end—it could not possibly mean anything good for either of them. “Did you do this?” he asked, gesturing around them at the clanning frozen in panic and confusion through the muted light.
“No. I would never break open the world like this.” A frown flickered across her brow as she eyed him with a wary curiosity. “I can only hope, when this is finished, that you come to believe me.”
Kherron had no reply to this; all he knew now was that he would never again fully believe a word she told him—not in its entirety. But he could not deny that she did know things beyond any knowledge he could ever gain himself, and the well of love and misery behind her eyes could never be fabricated, even by an immortal vessel. “What do you want?” he asked a second time, forcing the question into a much gentler delivery. If he did not steel himself now, he would drown again in those green eyes, would leap to her side and follow her wherever she wished to take him. The thought of it made his stomach curdle.
“The world gives birth to its darker self,” she said. “Such a devastating emergence will change everything, and even my own knowing cannot stop it. Whatever you feel towards me”—she swallowed—“whatever you spurn and resist, I beg you to continue east.” Tears fell freely now from her glowing eyes, staining her cheeks, though she did not sob or cry out; she did not move. “You must end this, Kherron. If not for me, if not for life and hope, then for her.” Dehlyn glanced behind him and nodded toward Aelis’ suspended, half-shifted form.
For a sliver of time in this frozen doorway, Kherron thought he would lash out at the vessel—attack her with all the fury and resistance he thought he’d set aside. To hear her mention Aelis in any way lit a protective fire deep within him, and while he wished it were different, he knew full well Dehlyn had struck his core with her w
ords. And she knew it.
He itched to place a protective hand upon Aelis—to reassure himself as much as her—but he could not let Dehlyn see his heart through such an act. The vessel had been correct in her assessment, but he did not wish to openly agree with her.
“Set this right, and I will come.”
Dehlyn shook her head. “The laws are unraveling, Kherron, but even I cannot undo what has been done. That falls to you.”
Gritting his teeth, Kherron had to look away from her when he offered a short, imperceptible nod. He would do this thing, but not for Dehlyn. He owed her nothing.
She raised her hand in what seemed an attempt to reach out for him. Then she paused, her lips pressed tightly together, and was gone.
The weight of her presence lifted from the still air around him, releasing his heart from its suffocating vice. Kherron took a deep, hesitant breath and allowed himself one more moment of solitude beyond time before embarking on the destiny he had promised himself would never be his.
Chapter 18
The room crackled with energy and power, but it only intensified the growing nausea in Ambrous’ belly. He never wanted this. The realization cut him as deeply as if his own knife had turned against him, the truth sharp and staggeringly horrid. And the things he’d just witnessed made his old bones tremble.
The ending of the amarach—those two the Brotherhood had imprisoned and subjugated beneath their will for decades—could not have been a more powerful omen. Despite this understanding, Ambrous still turned to glance at their returned Brother for one final confirmation of it.
Just like the rest of them, Torrahs had paused his relentless attack on the woman chained to the chair in the center of the tower. The man had folded his hands across the top of his staff and now stood with his chin lifted to the ceiling. Eyes closed, he inhaled deeply, as if consuming the scent of his most recent victory, and one corner of his mouth lifted in satisfaction.
Sacrament of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 3) Page 18