We had expected far more pushback from them, so we had remained uneasy. Especially now, with this meeting to recognize the one threat that the Horde had remained fixated on.
But we had finally arrived at the meeting point, so I stopped letting my thoughts wander and went back to looking for anything that might kill us.
We entered another clearing, which was half-covered in warded stones. The other half lay just in front of the cavern leading to the Horde Pathway. Directly in the middle of the clearing, a large, stone altar rose up to almost chest level.
Barnes, the pastor of our church back home and designated religious leader among the Malus Order, stood on one side of the altar. The heavy dark robes and glowing red chains around his neck did wonders for giving the normally mild-looking man a terrifying appearance, as did the invisible cloak of power radiating from him. Across from him waited the ambassadors of the Lost Deeps.
Ten of the attending Hordebeasts were Spawn—the tall, lanky horse-headed creatures that usually led the other monsters in real battles. They were thankfully clothed, outfitted with chain and plate armor composed of the same metal we had seen the Horde make for themselves. Each bore a large, two-handed sword strapped to their back, with straight blades at least four inches wide and six feet long. Green fire flickered across the runes inscribed on their gear. I estimated that a force like this could mop up an entire battalion of Dawnland or Spirit Kingdom troops all on their own, and likely rout an entire army, if no elites or heroes intervened.
Which put them roughly at the same level of power as our own eight bodyguards. Probably.
But just across the other side of the altar waited an even stronger creature, according to our data. The next class of Horde leadership, a Brute, stood at roughly the same height as the Spawn, but was far bulkier. Glossy plate armor the color of amber covered his entire body, save for the two long horns jutting out of the top of his helm and the bottom of his bovine mouth. Draped over the armor like a tabard was the fleshy, poorly cured hide of some exotically striped beast, probably one of the creatures that had once inhabited the Lost Deeps before its conquest. His vambraces appeared to be straining against the muscles they encased, and the thing’s maw was filled with multiple rows of sharpened, blood-stained teeth nearly as long as my fingers, yet he spoke in a tone that reminded me of the older professors at one of the colleges I had visited.
“I thank you, fellow disciple, for humoring me in our discussion,” the monster boomed eloquently. “It is always good to discuss matters of faith with a fellow believer, and a treasure to do so with one from a distant world. But now your cohorts have arrived, and we must turn our attention to discuss how to save much from being lost.”
“Indeed, brother believer,” Barnes said respectfully, “keeping fellowship is important, but so is preserving what is sacred. Lord Rhodes, Madame Dalfrey, I present to you one of Aegrim’s favored, Volg of the Bloody Sword and Gore-crusted Pen.”
“Hail, representative of the Many-Crowned King,” my father said in a respectful but confident tone. “I greet you in the name of Father Aegrim.”
“It has been some time since we last spoke,” the Brute rumbled. “I regret that we have been forced to come together under such unfortunate circumstances. But I see you, Lord Rhodes, and I recognize the Tyrant in you.”
I had no idea what the creature meant by that, but I saw my father’s head tilt the tiniest bit in appraisal.
“Thank you,” Dad said, his tone smoothly controlled. “As always, I appreciate your manners. You have already met Dalfrey and Barnes…but this is my son, Chris. He will be taking part in this meeting today.”
“Greetings, Warrenson,” the giant said courteously as he turned his head to look at me. I wondered how he could see me without any kind of visor. “I sense great hatred in you, and for the traitor-prince himself, at that. Therefore I praise and grieve for you, knowing that you must have a long, painful history in resisting the Usurper’s rise.”
“Um, thank you,” I said awkwardly, clamping down on my suddenly jittery bones. “It’s um, a pleasure to meet a Hordebeast as powerful and dignified as yourself.”
The giant bowed his head in response.
“You do me too much service,” the Bloody Sword said humbly. “I understand that you have been forced to put down many of our more traumatized children. King Volagro himselves appreciate your work, as he knows full well just how much pain the Usurper has caused the younger and more vulnerable of our people. But now we must discuss just how we can stop the Usurper’s dark work.” I fought to keep my expression blank as I wondered what new hell we were walking into. Himselves? Plural?
“Indeed.” My father nodded somberly, no hint of surprise or confusion on his face. That wasn’t a perfect indicator of his foreknowledge, but his eyebrow hadn’t even twitched, which meant this was yet another detail I hadn’t been worthy of receiving. “Volg, I owe you and your king an apology. My people greatly underestimated Wes Malcolm, and once it became clear that he was a greater threat than we realized, we reacted too hastily in an effort to try to take care of the problem ourselves, and we were too slow to inform your own people of our situation. I regret that things have become the way they are.”
I tensed. Dad had just given an apology.
In fact, he had started this whole conversation with an apology.
But he still seemed completely relaxed.
So he wasn’t giving it out of fear.
I began to sweat. Fearlessness from my father was concerning. But indulgence from him was completely unheard of. For all I knew, it meant he was about to attempt to blast the monster’s head off. But the giant just shook his horned head.
“Such an apology is unnecessary, Tyrant Earthborn,” the monster replied in his dark, gracious voice. “Your people were entrusted with the care of the most unsound mind to have ever befouled the Expanse. There is no creature alive that could predict this degenerate’s actions, not even the Many-Crowned King, praise be his name. We have been just as surprised by his actions as your people have been. But now that we have gathered here, our king has great hope that we can work together to finally contain his depravity.”
“That is my exact intent,” Warren Rhodes replied. “I am committing to give the one whom your king calls ‘Usurper’ and ‘traitor-prince’ my full attention. We will be pulling away our most elite teams from their current theaters and reorganizing them into a kill squad specifically geared to destroy Wes Malcolm before he can cause any further harm. But in order to be successful, we will need to isolate him from as many allies as possible, prevent him from escaping, and, most importantly, bring enough power to accomplish what Raw-Maw and our previous teams have failed to do.”
“I agree,” Volg replied, seeming to study my father from behind his visorless helm. “My king has great respect for the personal power of your disciples, but there can be no such thing as too harsh a response toward the traitor-prince. I regret that I have failed to convince you in the past. And it is why I must insist on being able to bring my own world’s resources into this endeavor. My king has instructed me to inform you that more of the seal must be undone, Tyrant Earthborn, else our people will no longer be able to aid you in your conquests. Understand that we do not make this statement lightly, for we value the kinship between our people and your own.”
My father did not immediately answer.
Instead, he let the silence hang in the air, remaining perfectly still the whole time. I felt the tension bleed off our own troops, but they maintained the motionless stances which my father demanded of his retinue. A moment later, I saw the fingers twitch on one of the Horde honor guard at almost the exact same time a Malus warrior next to me shifted his foot.
Then, Dad finally spoke.
“I accept,” he replied, sounding perfectly calm. “It is exactly as you said. We can’t afford to underestimate Malcolm again. Not when we’ve already lost three worlds, most of our portal network, and another high-value asset. Your peopl
e have proven capable enough in everything else we’ve asked of you. We would be happy to coordinate a joint exercise in this matter. Even if it means expending more resources on altering the Pathway out of your world.”
The giant Hordebeast took his own moment of silence, and we all grew still.
“You are gracious as always, Tyrant Earthborn,” Volg finally replied, speaking before anyone began to fidget. “You will be pleased to know that we do not wish to upset the current balance of power any more than your own Order wishes, and what we do grant will be to mutual gain. In fact, we have been anticipating this scenario. You will have a large force of basic personnel, our latest breed of scouts and trackers, and, as a gesture of our goodwill, we shall return the Pit Knights to you.”
My father blinked at that announcement.
“Those were offered to you unconditionally.”
“And for the sake of killing the traitor-prince, they will be returned just as unconditionally,” Volg said smoothly. “In addition, a new keeper of our faith, a Dark Icon and his entourage, will be sent to ensure victory. You have already informed us of the traitor-prince’s general location in the Golden Sands,” the Brute added, nodding toward Barnes. “We will be ready to leave as soon as we work out the general composition of our forces.”
“Excellent,” my father replied, “because, as we have already agreed, time is of the essence.”
Everyone relaxed as my father and the Hordebeast began planning the destruction of the one asset that could turn the tide in Avalon's wars.
Everyone but me.
CHAPTER 2: LEARNING THE ROUTE
I came down from the Rise with a gasp, struggling to understand what had just happened. The weight had been different this time. I had grown familiar with the sensation of defeating a Trial or Tumult, or even the power gained from overcoming one of my many layers of trauma. This had started the same, but only a few moments later, it had become something else.
Instead of grabbing onto a massive weight that didn’t want to go upward, the power became a kind of bird that wanted to fly away from me. It wanted to escape, go wherever it wanted, particularly places where I could not use it for growth. I had to catch handfuls of it at a time, which was frustrating, because there was actually more here than what I could even get from overcoming a Tumult. What was even more frustrating was that some of the fragments felt familiar to me, as if they had escaped my grasp countless times before.
In the end, I told myself that it would be okay if I could not catch it all. I would catch what I could, grow how I could, and then make the most of the next opportunity.
And in the meantime, I would capitalize on whatever victories I had achieved.
I gazed around at my team, and saw that everyone else was in a similar state to my own.
That wasn’t precisely true, I realized, as I looked closer.
This time, my group had actually gained more power than I had—especially Val. My young adopted sister was trembling violently and staring at her hands with a surprised sort of awareness on her face. I saw her open and clench her hands several times, before finally shaking her head and looking around.
The fairies and elves all seem to be the second-most affected, all shaking their heads in the same fashion, though they moved much more gracefully.
I was familiar with the effects of such an extreme power boost, so I gave them all a couple of moments to get their bearings. When the last one looked up, I nodded at them all.
“Is everyone ready?” I asked. “I’m certain the Malus Order is going to learn what we’ve done here, so we need to leave this area quickly. Take another moment if you need to, but I want us to destroy the local Horde Pit, spend about fifteen minutes looting whatever we can, and then pick a new spot to hole up—probably the ruined building we camped in earlier, at least for a little bit. We can make more plans once we get there, but I think we need to be out of here no later than an hour from now.”
I glanced back up at the now-starry sky. Even if the local Malus Order had somehow failed to notice Fragglerock’s massive construct disintegrating, or the numerous explosions our fight had caused, they were sure to realize something was wrong the next time one of them looked up and realized that they could actually see stars. Or when the entire team of Malus operatives teleported back home after dying here. Or, at the very best, they’d notice when he didn’t create the next thunderstorm on schedule, and that no one here was answering any calls.
As much as I wanted Rhodes’ enemies to keep underestimating me, by now it had to be too much to hope for.
So we headed in the direction of the Horde Pit that my team had found. Halfway there, Val had reached into her pack to discover that Ball-ee had leaped out at some point during everyone’s Rise. Thankfully, the little jelly had left circular tracks in the sand, so we could tell he was heading in the same direction as the Pit was supposed to be.
We arrived to find that he had already destroyed the tarry abomination. He waited in the center of the hole, surrounded by glass balls and another, smaller blue jelly, which was probably the former Pit. The larger Ball-ee stretched a pseudopod toward some of the glass balls.
“Di-rec-tive!” he said in an insistent, instructive tone. “Care! Heal! Save! Di-rec-tive!”
“Di-rec-tive?” the newer, smaller Ball-ee repeated. “Still…di-rec-tive?”
“Still!” our Ball-ee insisted. “Try! Strive! Save! Di-rec-tive!”
He was right. On Avalon, we had found people already reduced to the state of small orbs, but even they hadn’t been too far gone to revive. It had taken a lot of ambient magic, and would likely take a lot more to complete the process, but we had slowly begun to restore their bodies and minds.
All is not lost, the quiet voice said in my mind. Crown them, and write love on their arms.
I rage, it added softly, and then went silent.
“Okay,” I said out loud. “For those of you who have never seen Horde victims before, this is something we’ve encountered, and we’ve found it’s not too late to save them. We can carefully secure them in our packs and leave the area, and then one of us can run them through the portal on Avalon.”
“I’ll take them,” Petalbell spoke up. “I have my own holding bag. I can carry all of them myself without any problem. When we get to the Pathway, I’ll fly right through, hand them off to someone who can take them to Guineve, and then fly right back. It shouldn’t take any time at all.”
“That works,” I agreed, and the tiny fairy grew to about two feet tall and swooped down, pulling a bag out of thin air. With her other hand, she worked a quick Air magic spell, and the small orbs floated up and over to her.
“You’re all going to be okay,” she whispered tenderly to them. “I know you can’t believe that yet. But that’s okay, too.”
She made a shooing motion, and the little balls floated gently into her open bag. She closed it by pulling on its drawstring and then put the bag behind her, where it vanished.
“Ready,” she said confidently, flying over to Breyn. The Gaelguard gave the sprite a supportive nod, and we moved on.
There actually wasn’t much to search. My retinue had already looted the Malus Earthborn after killing them, and there wasn’t much here—it was supposed to be a prison, after all. The last Pendragon didn’t want to leave a whole bunch of treasure down in a hole that needed to be sealed for good, and he didn’t feel like leaving the guy who had attacked his wife with a lot of creature comforts.
But the Council had insisted that a few of the Air Tyrant’s belongings remain inside the tomb, the Pendragon had explained to me in a follow-up message, for some ‘bullshit reasons.’. It was one of the things that had tipped him off to the fact that they would one day try to free the bastard, just to make sure one of their murdering own did not suffer the humiliation of being held accountable by their victims.
So he had instructed me regarding where to find the items, as well as how to undo all the seals he had put on them.
; I crouched over one of the tiles on the floor and muttered the phrase ‘Ex-Councilman Peitan is a little bitch that loves to choke on necrotized testicles.’ As my retinue shot me concerned looks, the square tile folded open, revealing a curved, sheathed dagger set on top of a large book.
The book I knew to be a journal containing all of Fragglerock’s more complicated spells, including his Air magic and attempts at manipulating Spirit magic. Most likely, the Stellar Council had already copied what they could, and had left the book behind in case Peitan had an opportunity to renew his research, should he eventually be released.
It was a dick move by a group of people unused to being called out on their bullshit, so of course, they had done a horrible job at covering their tracks. I muttered the next set of expletives the ancient king had used to seal each item, and pulled them free of the hole, opening the book to confirm its contents.
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