by K L Reinhart
The elf was tumbling, head over heels and over knees and elbows down the rock face. Some unconscious reflex kicked in, as he tucked in his head and hunched his belly, but allowed his limbs to react and respond in as fluid a way as was possible.
Terak survived. He reached the end of the rockslide, his legs half covered in scree, without dying or smashing his head apart or even breaking any bones. Everything was a sea of dust for a moment as the groaning stopped, and the cavern was filled with the hiss of falling smaller stones.
Where is the Hexan? Terak coughed and gasped, pushing down the pain of a thousand grazes and scrapes that his fall had inflicted on his body as he pulled himself out of the scree slope and floundered to more solid ground.
The elvish assassin saw the Hexan, but even the form of the sorcerer, already surrounding himself with lines of green and blue and purple magics like his own personal comets, wasn’t anywhere near as catalyzing as the vision of the monster that was stepping out into the cavern.
Grom. Terak didn’t have to be told the name of this creature–as who or what else could it be?
Grom had skin of brindle and gray, but his texture appeared almost scaly, or as if he was made of tree bark that was so ancient and so deeply ridged as to have become rock. Dust plumes and chips of rock burst from the edges of the complicated ridges, as Grom used limbs that had lain long dormant.
Most of the primal god-thing’s body was still submerged in the scree and boulder-slope of his lair, but Terak could see the creature’s two long forearms or legs–reminding the elf of a cross between Father Gourdain’s bestiary-pictures of elephants and goats.
But the thing’s limbs were where the similarity ended, as the creature had no hair to speak of, and neither did it have a trunk or large ears. Instead, its face looked like a snout, with horse-like, flaring front nostrils at the tip of a jawline that encompassed fully half of its head.
The creature did have horns, though they were more like whorled antlers, two sets of two with the first set being the larger. These curves of bark or stone were bleached a pale bone-like color, and the assassin could see that they had many divots knocked out of them, as well as cracks, and fissures running across where they had presumably hit the undersides of mountains!
Grom had a barrel-like upper chest that narrowed extremely to the edges of large hips and the tops of what must be the thing’s lower legs, still mired in the stone.
And then, the god-thing opened its eyes, which were each almost as large as Terak was tall, and were a vivid, reptilian green.
“Blaaaade . . .” Words like grating boulders washed over the elf–and through Terak as he realized that he could hear them inside his mind, as well.
“Blaaade!”
Terak rolled away from the moving legs, each one ending in a paw with three giant claws at one end, and only one at the rear. The Ungol Blade! The elf thought. This god-thing, perhaps its slumber was somehow tied up with the fate of the blade itself.
The blade that was currently racing with the Hexan down the middle terraces, surrounded by the whirling sparks of magical power. Terak had no idea what side Grom was on, but he knew that the Fifth Family had placed reverence in it. Perhaps that had been misguided or foolish, but Terak immediately thought that if there was any reason for this Grom to be angered, then it might as well be at the Hexan, and not anyone else!
“There!” Terak shouted, pointing with his own blade at the fleeing form of the Hexan. “There is your blade! A thief takes it!” Terak was already breaking into a run back toward the terraces again, but within a heartbeat he realized that his plan had very much backfired—
“Thief! Intruder! THIEEEF!” The words spilled from Grom’s maw as well as his mind, and the elf could feel the blind outrage in them–and that outrage was directed at him.
One of Grom’s feet rose in the cavern space, moving slowly but unstoppably toward Terak’s running form.
Ixcht! The elf threw himself into a roll as the stone-bark paw slammed into the cavern floor behind him, where he had recently been. The ancient god-thing had missed, but a creature which was that powerful didn’t need to be exact.
Terak was lifted up from the floor by the shockwave, as the stones of the cavern floor broke and jumped in place. There was no way that even an elf with his quick reflexes could ever dodge or reach quick enough, as first one rock the size of a Tartaruk goat was thrown, slamming into the backs of his legs, and then another, this time much smaller but moving the faster for it, hit him in the belly.
“Augh!” Terak was pirouetted and spun to one side, skidding painfully across the floor to crash into another jumble of more stationary rock forms. The elf’s mind went blank for just a moment, before he slammed back into his body and his consciousness, coughing and panting.
Get up. Get up! Terak’s mind was pleading with the rest of him.
“Intruder! Peace-breaker! Blade-taker!” Grom, however, was not satisfied with such apparent pain caused. The god-thing appeared convinced that it was Terak, the first creature that it had seen when it had woken from its slumber, that must be to blame for whatever ill so consumed it.
But Grom could not reach the struggling elf on the floor. The monster’s stamp had already been a stretch for its elongated foreleg, and now it braced both long legs on the cavern floor, eliciting more shockwaves and more eruptions, to start pulling and heaving the rest of its body from the scree.
Get up! Get up! Terak coughed, forcing his battered and bruised body to its feet and stumbling as waves of dizziness shook him.
I’ll get no help from Grom, he thought, already turning away from the monster to search with blurring vision for the Hexan.
The human sorcerer was now surrounded by a net of energies, made up of whirling greens, blues, and purples. The ball was becoming a corona of light, almost obscuring the form of the man inside it.
Until Terak saw the Hexan’s arm crash downwards in front of him. The Ungol Blade broke through the lines of energy as if they were ribbons, creating a glowing rent in the tear it had created . . .
Through which the Hexan, and the Ungol Blade, jumped.
“NO!” Terak cried out, still running heedlessly forward toward the glowing tear in the fabric of the Midhara. The elf had no idea where that tear led, or what would be on the other side–whether another place in their middle world of the Midhara or the surreal and cruel landscapes of the Aesther–but more likely to be somewhere in the terrible Ungol realm itself.
“Peace-taker! Intruder! Blade-thief!” Grom’s words were a storm in the air and against the elf’s mind. The rage that the thing felt was so deep that it filled Terak with the images of bubbling and boiling mountains, avalanches, or burning forests.
“Fool!” Suddenly, powerful hands had seized one of Terak’s arms and lifted him bodily through the air, to come crashing to a halt in a one-armed bear-hug that held him completely immobile. There was only one being in this room who was strong enough or fast enough for that. Terak found that he was locked against the bashed and scratched black iron armor of the orcish champion, Vorg the Unwanted.
“Augh!” Terak grunted in pain and tried to kick with his heels against the legs of the orc as he was held off the floor. “Let me go! The Hexan is getting away!” The elf cried out, with tears springing into his eyes.
“Silence, fool of an elf!” Vorg commanded him, as the mighty shadow of Grom was rising over them–no, the elf noticed as he looked up–the shadow of one of Grom’s feet was rising over them both, slow and unstoppable.
“Terak!? Vorg?” a weak voice broke into their doom. It was Lord Falan, staggering and limping toward them, and looking distraught at their failure.
“You’ll kill us all!” Terak hissed.
“Shut UP!” Vorg hissed, raising his own heavy brow and tusked jaw to look up at the mighty foot that was even now descending over them both—
And the orc started to sing.
17
Orcsong
Terak could do nothing
as Vorg the Unwanted, who had been destined to be the Hexan’s personal champion, and the killer of hundreds of souls–sang.
There were no words to the orc’s music, but it also didn’t need any for its purpose.
The orc’s song lifted from a deep bass, like the sound of the crashing and fast-flowing streams of the Tartaruk Mountains, before slipping into a higher, lilting register like the haunting calls of the mournful gulls that found their way to the lakes and rivers in summer.
Terak was already stunned by the giant foot that was descending toward them, but his heart managed to be even more shocked by the music that Vorg was making. The massive orc had the speaking, growling, challenging, and insulting voice of snapping bones and of metal grinding on stone. The assassin of the Enclave had heard him bark and shout harsh commands, or hiss and growl, full of cold fury.
But the elf had never expected him to be able to sing! And Terak was amazed that the song was beautiful, in its own orcish way.
Vorg’s wordless melody rose and flitted around the heights of pure notes, always lilting and swaying in a sort of rhythm, before crashing down once again into the deepest notes of warning bells or booming underwater caverns. Then it would skip and dance to the strong, belting middle ranges, before growing softer and delicate.
And, amazingly, the elf completely forgot his imminent squashing at the foot of a god-creature of the Midhara. Instead, Terak’s mind was filled with images inspired or presented to him somehow by the orcsong: the crashing waves against distant coasts, timeless and eternal, and the deep and dark places of the earth like this one that they had fought through.
Finally, the rising notes of the orcsong presented to Terak’s mind an image of higher and higher airs, as if he could see from the eyes of a far-flying eagle. Terak imagined a pristine landscape without any signs of the Black Keep or chimney smoke or city or tower–just the endless horizon-to-horizon of mountains, deep snow fields, and harsh, uncompromising winds.
There was a kind of a peace that spread through Terak’s soul then, as he felt grateful for the fact that there were such wild and untouched places–or had been, once . . .
And, when the elf had opened his eyes, he saw that the shadow of Grom’s mighty paw had completely vanished. He now stood under the strange radiance left by the Hexan’s bright tear in the world, and Grom had lowered its head on its long neck to look at the pair, strangely.
“Peace-bringer, song-giver . . .” This time the words of Grom were lower and filled with an answering echo of that same peace that Terak had been given in the song. The fury had gone and was replaced with a feeling of—
Balance, Terak thought, as Vorg slowly released the elf to the floor, with the last note of his refrain dying in the cavern around them.
“Root magic,” Vorg said in hushed, reverential tones as he stared up with obvious wonder at Grom. The god-thing slowly blinked, as if in agreement.
“Where did you learn that?” Terak whispered, for Vorg to give a low chuckle.
“Not learn. Just know. That’s root magic,” The orc stepped out carefully from around the side of the elf, reaching out one of his own taloned hands to the god-creature. “Bad times,” the orc said heavily, ponderously. “To the north, the cold.”
“Baaad . . .” Grom said just as ponderously to the orc below him. “World-changing . . . World-breaking . . .” The voice of the methuselah sounded infinitely sad, and Terak felt his heart break.
“But,” Vorg said a little more firmly, still holding the gaze of Grom above him, as if the pair were entranced, “we can stop it. We can heal the world-breaking.”
“Heeeaal . . .” The massive head lowered still closer, almost to the tip of the orc’s hand. The creature huffed, just the once, and Terak felt as though he were deep in the Everdell Forest, surrounded by ancient and growing things.
“Blade keep Grom asleep . . .” the god-creature said, once again so very sad. “Grom supposed to protect blade . . .”
But then the god-creature lifted its great head, swiveling to look upwards, as if it could snuff at the far-away airs. The elf saw its great eyes start to squint and then narrow, and the atmosphere in the room changed. Terak could have sworn that he heard a distant booming sound in the bones of the mountains underfoot.
“Grom help,” the creature said, with all the strength and quiet fury of the mountains of the world itself.
Epilogue: The First Strike
Many leagues away from the promise being struck between god, orc, elf, and man, a very different contract was about to be struck.
Darkness lay in all of the arms of the cruel and uncompromising Tartaruk Mountains, and it was an unnatural darkness. Those sheer peaks themselves stood proud and defiant as they always did, their faces glistening with yards of thickened frost. Their acres stood white with ancient snow that had never had any foot mar their surfaces–just as they always had.
But the feet of the Tartaruks stood in darkened skirts of shadow, pitch black, as if some errant deity had dropped coal dust between them.
From the points of view of the Tartaruk eagles and vultures–those few of that fierce breed who remained up here–it would have looked like a black stain was seeping into the world, one valley at a time.
This unnatural night was spreading fast. It already encompassed so many leagues both east and west that it would take a man on horseback two days to ride from one end to the next, if there could miraculously have been some easy and straight road that made the journey.
Thankfully for the people of the Midhara, there were no straight roads that ran anywhere near the complicated Tartaruks. This was one of the ways that the Plague of Darkness, the Fourth Baleful Sign, was held back as it sought to wend and over-fill each mountain gulley and crevasse, gap and valley.
To the eyes of that supposed Tartaruk bird, it might have looked like its natural world was taking a pause, a small, steadying breath, before the night came.
However, such pauses are so often short in the games of gods and worlds–and nightmares.
In the heart of the darkness, there was but one patch that still appeared to lighten with that dreadful, eye-defying purple and pink bruise of Ungol-light. It was the secluded Vale of the Blood Gate, from whence the Fourth Plague came.
Before the gigantic, red-tinged Blood Gate, the half-alive man in the tattered black robes that he had once worn with pride, and then with scorn, and finally with subterfuge–stumbled as the thing inside of his chest finished its feast on the magic sent to it by a distant chanting statue.
That particular statue had been carved for such a purpose. Its masons had been the accursed First Family of the Elves, who had listened to alien and nightmare minds for their instruction.
One particular alien mind, another god-thing from the nightmare world of the Ungol, had been the very one to pass on the teaching of the living statue. She, the Queen of a Thousand Tears, who was called by those brave enough to say her name Ung’olut, had foreseen with her strange, thousand faces that there would be a future when the statue would be needed.
She had instructed that every key member of the First Family sorcerer kings and queens be fashioned in such a manner, and the statue that the human Lord Falan had inadvertently awakened was that of the Loranthian, the chief architect of the First Family of the Elves.
The statue’s magic had replicated that first magic that had opened the Gate the first time–and now its repeated words had helped with the second opening of the Blood Gate.
“Zyl . . . Zjkkaal . . . Zx.” The half-alive man finally finished the words, staggering a few steps forward and suddenly feeling so very light. There was a subtle change in the Ungol-light emanating from the Blood Gate behind him. With the slightest crunch as of a sandal walking on a gravel path, the Blood Gate touched down to earth.
The first stage was complete, and now the half-alive man did not know what happened next. All of his previous individuality had been blasted and scoured from his mind to make him ready for this painful, agoni
zing task, but there was still a fragmentary part inside of him which wondered . . . What happens to me now?
His answer came in a glitter of green, purple, and blue lights as the Hexan and his Ungol Blade ripped through the fabric of Midhara a little way away, leaving a bright tear that hung like an open wound, but glowed a bright white and silver.
The Hexan appeared very different from his usual self.
The half-alive man, ensorcelled and changed by his long burden, did not notice, of course.
But if that distant Tartaruk eagle or vulture had been able to fly over the malefic airs of the vale, and yet even able to pierce the Plague of Darkness with sharp eyes, they would have seen how the Hexan panted and gasped.
Ung’olut never said the Blade was protected by one of the First Creatures! the human sorcerer thought. But what did he expect? Ung’olut was the Queen of a Thousand Tears! Even after everything that he had done for her and her brother god-creature, the Hexan knew that Ung’olut still wouldn’t even blink an eye at killing him.
Which is why I need the Ungol Blade. The Hexan remembered his unholy purpose and stepped forward to drive the arcane blade through the back of the half-alive man.
The ruined cultist who had once been a member of the Black Keep inhaled sharply in surprise before tumbling to the floor between the arches of the Blood Gate. His own life-stuff pooled out onto the patch of blasted, bare, and cursed ground between the worlds.
“Arise . . .” The Hexan stepped back, with the Ungol Blade drooping a little in his tired hands. But the sorcerer still managed to point it forwards, toward the blood, and the Blood Gate.
And something strange started to happen to the blood that was collecting there. The ichor of the half-alive man surged and moved too quickly, as the creature that had been alive in the ruined soul of the half-alive man joined its new world and started to take shape.
At first, the blood started to build, racing upwards in thin lines like the inked lines of a scribe’s illustration. And then they branched and thickened out, forming shapes, contours, limbs.