Vedientir

by Ivan Hladni

  He placed one of his feet on the wall, but was afraid to climb all the way on top of it. No part of the wall near to them looked even remotely stable. He looked beyond it and downward and immediately he found that his expectations were wrong. He did not see a deep river canyon, or even a dried up one. It was actually exactly like Eya said it would be. He was standing at the edge of the world. There was only air in front of him, and beyond the edge where they were now standing were clouds.

  "We are really high up," said Dion as his eyes moved toward Triboria. He saw clouds instead of a river floating under the bridge that led to the other island. He smiled and looked at Eya who was on his right.

  "I understand now why you call that forest and hills the Heavens," he said. "This is the edge of some plateau and that there is a mountain peak. I know that there are mountains whose peaks tear through the clouds, but I was never on one. Such mountains can be found east of the Thin Island."

  "What is that down there?" asked Kerkio when he and the dragon joined Dion and Eya at the edge.

  "That's the Eternal Storm I mentioned earlier, and Chaos is beneath it."

  "There are lowlands beneath those clouds, I am sure," said Dion. "I've looked at enough maps in my life to know what to expect, and no storm lasts forever."

  Eya turned toward him and he could clearly see that he had angered her.

  "And that mountain peak down there in the clouds? Does it have a name?" asked Kerkio once more, still looking at the world beyond the wall.

  "What mountain peak?" replied Eya and bent over the wall to see what Kerkio was talking about. She knew quite well that neither she nor anyone else had ever seen anything similar in the Eternal Storm.

  Kerkio and the dragon were the first to jump away from the wall that stood at the edge of the world.

  "Dion! Eya! Get away from there!"

  "Grom, save us!" screamed Eya and jumped away from the edge as if she was stung.

  "Dion! Let's go home right now. We do not belong in this place!" shouted Kerkio, and Dion wanted to listen to him but he could not avert his eyes from the world beyond that short stone wall.

  "Run! Chaos rises!" shouted one of the burans who flew out from somewhere underneath their feet and beyond the stone wall. Even the buran's voice shook from terror and fear as he flew away toward Triboria.

  Dion moved a step from the edge when the world began shaking again and loosened a few stones that fell off the wall into the abyss. He grew pale. Even the ground beneath his feet was no longer safe or familiar as it was. Eya's Eternal Storm was not as strong as it was only moments ago and he could now see mountains through the storm clouds and small dots flying furiously up and toward them.

  "Burans!" he recognized them but then his eyes noticed something he could not fathom. He only understood that what he was seeing was not possible but yet his eyes refused to see otherwise. He felt nauseous. Whole mountains were flying up after the burans and the remnants of the Eternal Storm ripped away everything that was on those mountains - snow, rivers, forests and lakes. Everything was scraped off and blown to dust before the mountains themselves started cracking and breaking into pieces.

  Burans broke out of the abyss followed by the roar of the wind of all winds that carried with it the screams and pieces of the mountains torn apart by the Eternal Storm.

  Burans flew high and fast, and escaped the danger, but then the stones slowed their ascent and as if fired by hundreds of catapults, the stone rain began mauling both Arvinia and Triboria.

  The world was noise, stone from the sky and dust. The world was chaos.

  "Well happy birthday to me!" Dion screamed angrily into the air, trying to rid himself of the fear that was gripping him. "I've lived just long enough to have some rock scrape me off the face of the world!"

  He took a deep breath.

  "These are my last breaths," he thought and now noticed the sweetness of each breath he took as he watched one world hurtling toward another.

  "The end of the world," rushed through his mind.

  "I do not want this!" he screamed, but his voice was inaudible and irrelevant in the roar of the world in ruin.

  "I do not want..." he said silently once more to himself, now painfully aware that his wishes do not count. The only thing he could do was to try and survive.

  He turned to face the others.

  "I am sorry," his eyes spoke for him when he looked at Kerkio. His decisions brought them here and into harm's way.

  "Back! Right now!" Kerkio commanded adamantly. He saw no anger on Kerkio's face, at least he hoped so. There was only will, unshakeable will.

  "Back to the Oak!"

  "Hodai, lyud! Hodai!" shouted the dragon as well. "Let's go, human. Let's go."

  "This stone storm will destroy the Tree!" yelled Dion as he watched the pieces of the broken world shower Arvinia's forest.

  "To Triboria!" Eya suggested sternly. "We have no other choice!"

  The cloak on her back moved on its own and split in two. Each part grew longer and then spread out like sails on a fishing boat in Phares. It was no longer a cloak.

  Eya had wings.

  She started running toward the villagers who were rushing to get across the bridge to Triboria, and with one swing her wings lifted her high into the air. She turned back to face Kerkio and Dion in a motion that looked like she was swimming in air. She waved for them to follow her but they only stared back at her in wonder. She waved to the dragon then, gesturing for him to lift himself into the air and follow her, but the dragon stayed firmly on the ground, even though he understood what her call meant.

  "Nai letyt ya. Nai znat!" cried the dragon in desperation and moved his wings with less knowledge and grace than a newly hatched chick.

  "He says he doesn't know how to fly!" shouted Dion so she could understand what the dragon said.

  "I'll wait for you on the bridge! Hurry!" she called the men from Aelan. "There's a new storm coming," she said and turned their attention toward a dust cloud carried by a new wind from the south. When they turned back she was already gone.

  "Should we listen to her?" asked Dion. "It's not like we can reach the Tree through that hail of stone?" He noticed that he had to talk loud in order to push the words to Kerkio even though they stood next to each other.

  "It's as if the Eternal Storm moved up here!" he spoke as loud as he could without shouting but Kerkio struggled to hear him and the ever stronger wind brought with it overbearing clouds that darkened the sky.

  "Lyud!"

  The dragon called them through the roar of the wind and a strange note in the wind followed his call. The weird sound came from beyond the stone wall and then the bridge erupted into the air, stricken from beneath by a giant boulder that tore it and some of the villagers on it into pieces. Those who survived the strike fell screaming into the gaping emptiness that stood now between Arvinia and Triboria.

  "Isah vi!" the dragon shouted again. "Behind you!"

  "What now?" Dion panicked and turned swiftly, expecting a rock to smite them as it did the villagers on the bridge, but what he saw was worse. A mountain as tall as those around Tialoch was ripping through the air on its final approach to Triboria and then it struck the island somewhere behind the first hill. The very air they breathed vibrated from shock.

  It was time to run for their lives, regardless of the stone rain that was still falling on Arvinia, but even Kerkio fell silent and still before this destruction. Their eyes kept staring into the unknown and the still unimaginable, carving every detail deep into their memories.

  The dragon nudged Dion and Kerkio to move while there was still some light coming through the ever denser dust that ate the air around them.

  "Odhma," answered Dion. "Right away," he said, but he kept staring at the earth and trees from the mangled forest of Triboria falling back down to the island from the air into which they were thrown by the blast.

  A sound like that of gigantic whips ripped through the air above Triboria. They blinked, and by t
he time their dust-filled eyes opened once more, the first hill of Triboria trembled and moved. At first it moved ever so slightly, as if to see if it could move at all, and then it rushed down into the abyss. The mountain that struck Triboria rolled over the newly formed edge of the island and fell after the hill that it cut off from the world. It left behind a great wound in the island where it struck, a wound that now bled water into the unknown from a broken riverbed.

  Eya returned for them and found them in the ever denser dust cloud that filled the air. Her feet touched the ground between the three of them and her wings once again folded on her back.

  "Are you all right? Are you hurt?" asked Dion, and all three of them examined her carefully.

  "No," she said grimly. Her hands shook.

  "Dobra bit!" Dion shouted to the worried dragon. "She is all right!" he said, but then the south wind changed its roar, and the short wall that stood there was no longer the edge of the world. There was land beyond it now - an entire island heading straight toward them, and on it was a structure not made by nature. That much they could see through the dust. It looked like a keep made of dark stone, or so it seemed to their watery eyes. But, their eyes could better see an even larger island behind the one that was coming their way, and that other one was on its way to Triboria.

  A previously unfelt kind of panic gripped them when they understood that these islands moved slowly and steadily. The more they looked at them the more they seemed to be navigated and driven, and then the moving islands rammed the islands of Triboria and Arvinia, like sailors from Phares do with their ships of war.

  The world beneath their feet cracked in many places and a new cloud of dust rushed towards them. Just a moment before Dion had to close his eyes to shield them from the dust wave he could have sworn that he really saw a keep on the island and its gates opening.

  "The stone rain has stopped!" shouted Kerkio and moved a few steps back toward the village. "We can go back! And we are going back! Right now! I see figures in the dust there!"

  The wave of dust now surrounded them completely, and the wind that carried it was so strong that it snatched air from their nostrils when they tried to breathe. They had to lower their heads in order to steal their next breath and to shield their cheeks from the debris in the air that stabbed them like hungry beetles.

  Dion's knees shook in the wind, but he knew quite well that it was not only the wind that made them weak, and it quickly became less important to him that the others don't see him shaking. What became important was that they see him at all. He swung his arm through the air, trying to touch anyone, and then he felt Kerkio's hand taking his right arm and his voice calling him.

  "Eya!" shouted Dion and stretched out his left arm to try and find her but his voice got no farther than to the tip of his left hand. She found it somehow in the blinding wind and drew herself closer to the two of them. He bent his arm backward and she followed it into the lee behind him and Kerkio.

  "Zmai!" shouted Dion.

  "Lyud!"

  "Good! Everyone is here." It was a comforting feeling.

  "Dion!" Kerkio called him while trying to stay as close as possible to the dragon. "If you have anything similar to that watery creature that you summoned in Aquia, now would be the time to summon all that you have at your disposal!"

  "I have one more earth elemental, I'm sure," he answered, remembering how Daedar had used it in Lorei. "I'll do it now!"

  "Here!" he shouted to Kerkio when he found it, and then he spoke the rune etched into the acorn.

  "Zemni!"

  As soon as he spoke the rune of the acorn that he held in his hand he remembered that he should have let it fall to the ground because grandfather had used some earth to summon the earth elemental. He was about to lay the acorn down when his hand succumbed to the pressure of the magic and opened. There was so much dirt and sand in the air around them that the earth elemental began forming mid-air.

  Dion let the already heavy acorn fall out of his hand but the acorn never touched the ground. The elemental was forming so quickly that instead of the acorn two already formed feet touched the ground and the rest of the body continued rising from them, layer by layer, as the magic stole dirt from the wind and formed the elemental's body.

  The forming magic drew so much dust from the air that for a moment they could see more than just their noses. In front of the walls of the keep that was anchored at the edge of the world they saw a battle standard carried by an army marching out of the keep's gates. It was the same red standard of the fallen dragon that Dion saw in Echa Rei the morning the city fell.

  "Gospar? Sto radit zemni?" the earth elemental called for commands.

  "Sah nami spram onih," said Dion and reminded himself of his grandfather in Lorei and his command to that elemental. "With us against them," he said to the earth elemental, and he pointed toward the approaching red standard that slid once more behind the dust veil. The elemental pushed against the wind toward the enemy and Dion turned to the group.

  "They are almost upon us!" he shouted to make sure he was heard. "We should try to find our way to the forest and hope we do not stray to and fall off the edge!"

  In the middle of his last shouted sentence the wind stopped. Completely. It was as if it never blew at all.

  Dion felt warmth in his body. He was sensing the heat of his own body that was no longer being scraped off him by the wind.

  "Vetr is coming," Eya shouted loudly, as if the wind was still howling in their ears.

  "Vyetar?" asked Dion in the old language, using the word that was known to him to mean "wind". It seemed to him that is what she meant to say. "You said the wind is coming?"

  "No," she answered. "Vetr is coming. And the burans," she explained and thought that was enough, but Kerkio and Dion still looked at her waiting for an explanation.

  "The god of wind is coming."

  Chapter 16 - Vedientir

  It was easier to breathe after the wind stopped but the air around them was still full of dust that was settling to the ground too slowly for comfort. They could not see the movement of the approaching army clearly but could hear the hum of their feet even though they had already retreated to the road that led from the village of Arvinia to the lost bridge of Triboria.

  "What is that?" Eya asked nervously and turned swiftly to face the sound that raised hairs on her arms.

  Even before Dion could answer her, a shrieker's scream pierced their ears once again, and while their teeth still itched from the squealing note of the unseen shrieker, a raven began croaking loudly in the distance, somewhere on their left.

  "Your ravens!" shouted Kerkio and his voice awakened a whole pack of shriekers.

  "I cannot see the ravens or the shriekers!" panicked Dion, but in that moment the dust that was in front of his face disappeared.

  The wind blew from above their heads straight down and it pressed the dust back into the ground firmly and resolutely. A solitary lightning pierced the dark storm clouds that had gathered above their heads.

  "This is impossible," thought Dion, standing in air that was cleared of dust in a single breath. A few specks of dust still lingered in the air, defying the will of the wind by their smallness, but the world was cleaned of the smothering dust and was once more bathed in the yellow light of the day's end.

  "We managed to get close to the village," said Kerkio now that his eyes could see again how close they were to the forest that surrounded Arvinia.

  "Grak!"

  The ravens were flying back to Dion from Triboria, followed in the distance by shapes that looked like white arrows flying at breakneck speed. The burans were returning, just as Eya said they would.

  "Run!" shouted Kerkio and pulled Dion. He noticed what the shriekers were up to while Dion and Eya were watching the burans.

  A striking force of shrieker riders like the ones that stole little Leut from Mara separated from the main force and charged toward them, passing unscathed by the earth elemental who was too slow to c
atch them. Their gray skin was covered in armor made of patched leather that once belonged to something hairy. They were armed with long bats, and one who looked like their leader carried a large battle hammer that was dull on one end and had a long spike for piercing armor and skulls on the other.

  "Prelas!" shouted the ravens now that they were above their heads and pointed with their beaks toward Triboria. "A crossing."

  A group of burans was there, busy building a new bridge out of tree trunks and tree roots over the chasm where the stone bridge used to be.

  "Nai! An Putodrvo!" argued Dion and pointed with his head in the other direction, toward the village.

  "Go to Triboria with the remaining villagers!" shouted Eya to Dion and Kerkio as she ran to meet the rapidly approaching shriekers.

  "Eya! Come back!"

  Both Dion and Kerkio called her but she said nothing in return.

  She stopped some distance away from the Dion, Kerkio and the dragon and waited for the leader of the assault who turned the sharp end of his battle hammer to face her and commanded his shrieker into a frenzied sprint. The other seven riders followed him.

  She was still motionless even after the shrieker leader was only ten steps away from her.

  Nine steps.

  "What is she doing?" asked Dion and looked at Kerkio whose worried eyes were watching Eya. His fighting arm tensed but he dared not move from fear of breaking her concentration. It was already too late to help her. They could only hope she knew what she was doing.

  Seven steps.

  Her wings broke off of her body faster than anyone could see it actually happening. Two limbs looking like human arms grew on each of the wings, and the wings themselves began looking more humanlike.

  "Air elemental?" gasped Dion in surprise.

  "Ridiculous!" said Kerkio with a smile, being as equally surprised as Dion was.