Shattering Earth: An Urban Fantasy Adventure (Magic of Nasci Book 4)

by DM Fike

  From somewhere behind me in the wide fields of the homestead, the Sassy Squad appeared. They’d been awake and active already for some time. Darby huffed, out of breath, and wiped her sweaty brow, obviously tired. Tabitha, on the other hand, looked as composed as a dour professor as she crossed her arms. She waited patiently for Guntram to finish.

  When Guntram lifted his head, the raven flew immediately back up into the air, heading north again. “There’s been a new development at Mt. Hood,” Guntram told Tabitha. “A fresh attack of three.”

  “Three?” Tabitha gasped. I’d never seen her so astonished, her eyes bulging out.

  Guntram nodded. “The original plus two new ones.”

  “That’s not possible,” Tabitha said. “There shouldn’t be enough pith for that.”

  “Well there is,” Guntram insisted.

  I glanced over at Darby, gesturing in confusion at the two augurs. She pursed her lips but said nothing.

  Darby might know what they were talking about.

  “Regardless,” Guntram said. “The others need backup. I must go.”

  “You?” Tabitha asked incredulously. “Did the Oracle ask for you specifically?”

  “No,” Guntram admitted, “but she sent my kidama. Her intent seems clear.”

  “Her previous instructions are even more clear,” Tabitha said. “You should be a last resort.”

  I watched this rapid argument between them like a cat at a tennis tournament. Darby also leaned forward to keep up with the conversation, although she tried to act nonchalant about it.

  We didn’t fool either of the augurs. Guntram motioned to Tabitha. “Let us continue this discussion in private.”

  Tabitha pointed at Darby. “Run five laps around the homestead.” She then tilted her head at me. “It couldn’t hurt you to join her, haggard.”

  “You’re not my augur,” I retorted, hating how much I sounded like a little kid.

  “Do it, Ina,” Guntram said.

  “You’re not serious,” I cried, but by the way he shooed me after Darby’s retreating form, he meant it.

  “Go on now.” Tabitha sneered. “Your augur ordered it.”

  I wanted to talk with Darby anyway. I pushed my frustration aside as I ran after her.

  “Hey!” I called, sprinting so we could run together and hold a conversation. “Wait up!”

  Darby slowed. “What is it?” she asked, staring straight ahead.

  “That conversation.” I waved back at the augurs entering the lodge. “You know what they were talking about?”

  Darby shook her head. “I’m not high enough rank.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  Darby may have stalled so I could catch up, but once jogging next to her, she picked up speed. I had to inhale ragged breaths at odd intervals to match her.

  I wouldn’t let exercise delay my questions. “I saw it… in your expression. You… know what’s attacking… don’t you?”

  Darby accelerated to get away from me, but I pushed myself forward, determined to keep her grueling pace. As it became clear I wouldn’t let her run off, her composure melted.

  “Okay, fine,” she said, moderately winded now. “It’s a fire golem, okay? Like the one we defeated before.”

  “Whoa.” So, Rafe had been right. Golems were attacking the lava dome.

  “Yes, whoa,” Darby threw back at me.

  I glanced over at Darby’s perfect form. “You… should be up there… too.”

  Darby led us around one of Sipho’s gardens, gaze focused on the flowering vegetables. “But I’m not a full-fledged shepherd.”

  “I’ve seen your… sigil work. You’ve mastered… all the elements. Why… not?”

  “Because I haven’t completed my Shepherd Trial.”

  “So when… will it happen?”

  She shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. All Tabitha will say is that I’ll recognize when the time is right.”

  I half-laughed, half-choked on my own breath. “That’s what… they all say.”

  “Guntram hasn’t told you more about your Shepherd Trial either?”

  “He says each trial… is different. That Nasci… knows when I’ll be… ready.”

  “Hmm,” she said noncommittally.

  “Doesn’t that… bother you?”

  “I trust Tabitha,” Darby said with conviction. “She will do what’s best for me, always.”

  My mind flashed back to Phineas. “You’re not… Tabitha’s first… eyas.”

  That finally halted Tabitha in her tracks. “Come again?”

  We’d just rounded the backside of the forge, a grove of trees on the other side. The seclusion provided a perfect place for a chat. We both stopped to catch our breath, after which I elaborated.

  “Guntram told me that Tabitha had an eyas before you. Killed by a fenrir.”

  “Wolves,” she breathed. “No wonder Tabitha avoids them, even the dryants. I always thought it odd, given that no other animals, not even predators, bother her.”

  “It also explains why Tabitha’s so hard on you. She wants you to be prepared for any situation so you’ll never die fighting a vaettur, no matter how tough.”

  Darby nodded. “And I am grateful for it.”

  Personally, I wouldn’t have felt gratitude. In my opinion, Tabitha’s obsession on training bordered on cruelty. But I didn’t say that in front of Darby.

  Besides, what she said next nearly knocked me over. “Thank you for giving me this insight. You should know, too, that Guntram also had a former eyas.”

  “What?”

  Darby slapped on a satisfied smirk. “I guess that means you were unaware.”

  I didn’t care if she won our little game of Augur’s Secrets. “Tell me about her.”

  “Him,” Darby corrected. “A quiet young man. I only met him a few times my first years as an eyas. He was several years older than me, but he struck me as a hard worker, a soldier who would follow the rules of Nasci strictly to the letter of the law.”

  My guts tightened, predicting this story’s ending. “Did he die?”

  “Worse.”

  I frowned. “What’s worse than death?”

  “He was bound.”

  I inhaled a sharp intake of breath that had nothing to do with exercise. I’d been threatened to be bound so often, it had lost some of its impact. It seemed like a boogeyman story, something you told children that never actually came true. And yet, Darby had met an eyas whom the shepherds had deemed so unworthy of Nasci, they had permanently twisted his pithways so he could no longer access her energy.

  “What did he do?”

  “From the rumors, I gather he grew frustrated with humans encroaching on wildlife. He killed a hiker ‘on accident,’ but was given only a rebuke for this first offense. A subsequent slaying of a pair of hunters hinted the first death was likely premeditated.”

  My insides chilled. “He murdered people?”

  “In the name of Nasci,” Darby confirmed. “And while that may or may not alone have gotten him bound, he also endangered Giles, the mountain goat dryant, in order to access his second victim. Many of Giles’s goats were slain during his act of revenge, including a set of newborn twins.”

  I’d met Giles before. He hung out around Mt. Jefferson. Mountain goats had been all but wiped out in the area until rangers had reintroduced them some years back. While their numbers had steadily increased since I became a shepherd, the occasional poacher still hunted them down for their prized horns.

  Darby continued. “Tabitha regards Guntram’s eyas as a cautionary tale, that while we protect nature, we must be careful in our haste not to destroy it.”

  Tabitha’s shrill whistle broke into our little hiding spot. We dashed back to the lodge to find a triumphant Tabitha standing on the lodge’s threshold next to a scowling Guntram.

  “I leave immediately for Mt. Hood,” she announced, facing Darby as if I weren’t there. “You will remain here with Guntram.”

  Darb
y nodded in immediate acceptance, but I asked, “Why you and not Guntram?”

  “It is none of your concern,” Tabitha snapped.

  I might have retorted more, but Guntram fixed me with a glare that I swear stirred my internal air pith. I’d seen my augur in varying stages of anger, but right now he looked like he could set off a hurricane at a moment’s notice. I bit my cheek to keep from responding.

  Satisfied with getting in the last word, Tabitha turned back to Darby. “Unless Guntram puts you on another task, keep up with your daily routine. I’ll check for noticeable improvement when I return.”

  “And when will that be?” Darby asked in the most subservient voice I’d ever heard her use.

  “When Nasci deems the threat over,” Tabitha answered, the shepherd way of saying she had no freaking clue.

  Without further ado, Tabitha strode toward the forest. From every corner of the homestead—behind buildings, in between trees, and even in the gardens they shouldn’t have been able to enter—six of her kidama deer emerged, creating a parade in her wake. The last stubby black tail wriggled into the underbrush with the barest whisper of sound.

  CHAPTER 12

  GUNTRAM ACTED LIKE I predicted he would: he holed himself up in the library. Darby watched him with a puzzled expression as he stomped into the building with a flock of angry ravens buzzing around him like gnats.

  “What is he researching?” she asked me. “New sigils?”

  “I guess. He doesn’t tell me anything.”

  Darby raised an eyebrow at that. “I thought the two of you were close.”

  Her comment irritated me. “Not close enough.”

  Darby realized she overstepped a boundary and shifted topics. “I suppose I’m off to practice then.” She took a step away from me but then paused. “Do you care to join me?”

  My legs were still stiff from the spontaneous run. “Nah, I got other things to do.”

  Darby looked like she wanted to call my bluff but decided against it. She headed for one of the nearby ponds, hands creating blobs of water from her inner pith.

  I, on the other hand, strolled to the gardens, away from where Darby could see me. I skirted around the crooked post toward the back, unburying the dirt at its base with my earth pith. The time had come to dig up my emergency credit card to buy batteries. Something told me it was going to get worse before it got better, and I’d need access to every type of pith at my disposal, not just the four staples.

  Eager for my prize, I reached inside the narrow cavity. I grasped the soft cloth of Sipho’s waterproof pouch but did not feel any hard plastic inside. Untying the strings, I found not the credit card, but a neatly folded note inked with a familiar handwriting. I read it with a sinking heart.

  “Need to borrow this. Sorry. Sipho.”

  I groaned. Sipho knew I would buy batteries with this. She personally benefited from my purchases. Why had she taken my only line of credit now?

  I sighed. The reason didn’t matter. With Sipho gone, I would have to operate without lightning pith after all. Traveling to my parents’ house in Lynnwood took too long, and besides, I wasn’t in the mood to deal with my mom’s general disapproval of my entire life.

  Why did this have to happen now?

  Stuck in limbo, I decided to blow off steam with a walk. Kicking up dirt, I stormed off into the forest. Guntram hadn’t explicitly told me to stay on the homestead, and besides, it was my augur’s fault I felt the urge to brood. Why hadn’t he told me about his first eyas? Like Darby, I just assumed there hadn’t been others. He talked freely about the other shepherds, even ones that had done terrible things, all to teach me a lesson in how not to act. Why hadn’t he used his own people-hating protégé as an example of what not to do?

  I jumped through a wisp channel that took me toward three remote waterfalls, all within a few miles of each other. Although there were hiking trails that provided public access, few people ventured up the one-lane gravel roads to get there. Fewer still approached the falls from the top, where thick wilderness ruled the landscape. It took me the better part of a half hour, but I wound my way over the crest of Moon Falls and peered down, happy to find the beat-up picnic table that marked the trail’s end deserted. I crouched on a stone overlooking the cascading water, the rushing sound of the fan-shaped falls a soothing balm to my sore nerves.

  I had always been the type of person who took long walks to clear my head. Becoming a shepherd only formalized that process, as I absorbed all the fresh pith around me. My mind emptied in the presence of such raw beauty. Here in the spray of the falls, cleansing water pith merged with air and earth to recycle all my old fuel for new. I combined those into fire and drew an inner heat sigil as goosebumps formed on my bare legs.

  I fell into a semi-trance, mulling over my conversation with Darby, and a realization dawned on me. Guntram must have taken his previous eyas’s failings personally. It explained why he among all shepherds held less bitter feelings toward people, despite how the human race had destroyed large swatches of wilderness over his lifetime. In fact, it might also be why he chose to train me, the older eyas, already way past her prime. He’d seen something in me that Tabitha loved to remind him wasn’t worth noticing.

  Was it because I reminded him of his former eyas? Or because I was so different?

  I couldn’t answer those questions from Darby’s brief recount, but knowing Guntram, he’d strive to make amends. Unlike Tabitha, who viewed the world in stark black and white, Guntram lived in grayscale. Even though he hated that I wielded lightning, he attempted to teach me how to use it. He wanted me to succeed as a shepherd, to be the best follower of Nasci I could be, but most important of all, he allowed me to forge my own path rather than reign me into a tight mold.

  This insight made me regret keeping Rafe a secret from him. I had convinced myself that Guntram would never accept a non-shepherd into our world, but if that were true, he would never have chosen to train me. He should have outed Vincent, too, when he had the chance. But he did neither of these things. Maybe, if I could find the right time and place, I could squash my stupid pride and admit what Rafe and I had accomplished.

  Maybe we could work together to tackle this for a change.

  A series of barks broke across the relative silence of the serene falls. I craned my neck toward the trail as children’s laughter filled the air. A family of four with their black Labrador puppy swarmed the picnic bench. The dog caught a whiff of my scent, yipping excitedly as the kids asked for snacks. The younger kid, a tween in a flowered pink jacket, tracked her dog’s gaze and spotted me.

  “A lady!” she cried.

  I slipped back behind a tree before the rest of the family saw me too. I intended to slip back toward the wisp channel when her older brother’s self-assured tone reached my ears. “No one’s up there, idiot. It’s way too steep for any girl to climb.”

  I grimaced. I peeked around the bark to find a middle-school aged boy stomping his way up slippery rocks. His dad half-heartedly told him to come back but let him wander off. The mother, meanwhile, told the girl not to follow. I hated the whole ordeal. Oh, climbing around’s too steep for the girl but just fine for her bratty older brother?

  Not on my watch.

  As the brother approached the base of Moon Falls, I focused my earth pith and drew wavy lines over a square, making the rock he stood upon as slippery as oil. He yelped as he landed butt first on a series of stones behind him. Mom called out in concern as Dad howled in laughter at the brother thrashing in the water. The sister took the opportunity to scurry over the rocks. I dried her path and kept the moisture away from her so she wouldn’t come out soaked.

  It wasn’t my most appropriate use of pith, but it ranked up there with one of the most satisfying.

  “Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t,” I whispered to the girl as she aided her brother back to the picnic table. Then I vanished back into the forest.

  CHAPTER 13

  A CROWD WAITED for me at th
e homestead. I would have called it a welcome wagon, except it came in the form of Fechin and a few of his goons harassing me with a barrage of squawks. My absence had been noted and filed under “outrage.” The birds led me directly to a fuming Guntram as I crossed the threshold. An anxious Darby shifted behind him.

  “Where have you been?”

  I decided to match his irritated tone. “Out for a walk. Is that not allowed now?”

  He pointed up to the circle of ravens swooping above him. “You should have alerted my kidama.”

  “They should have been doing their jobs better,” I shot back. This increased their clamor to a new level. Darby shrunk back in horror at my defiance.

  Guntram rose to meet me. “You always have a witty comeback for everything, don’t you, Ina?”

  “Only as long as you keep slinking off to do your little private research. It’s not like I had anything better to do.”

  “That’s where you are wrong!” Guntram proclaimed with an underlying ‘aha’ in his voice. “We have more golems to hunt.”

  “What do you mean?” Darby asked.

  Guntram brought her up to speed with the recent vaettur attacks. “And now not only do we have a possible air golem out there but a water one as well.”

  I managed not to roll my eyes. I really wasn’t in the mood for another round of chasing windmills. “Why don’t you send ravens to scout the area? They’ll come back and tell us if they spot anything, and it will save us a lot of wasted time.”

  Guntram went from irritated to absolutely furious in a heartbeat. His pupils turned milky with wind as he bellowed, “Because this is all I am allowed to do!”

  Darby actually squeaked as she cowered away from Guntram, but I held my ground. I’d seen my augur this angry before, when I had decided to save a human from a golem-caused fire instead of rescuing a herd of elk. I’d been scared then, thinking it directed at me, but now I realized I was only the secondary target of his fury.

  Guntram hadn’t finished his lecture. “The Oracle has deemed it necessary for me to stay off Mt. Hood. I can’t guard Nasci there, but that does not mean I cannot contribute.” He lowered his tone, rage melting away to determination. “I do not know if or when the golems attack, but if they do, I’ve discovered a…” he paused to search for the right word, “…technique that will help stop them for good. If I can do that, there is no need to protect Mt. Hood at all.”