Reckoning of Fallen Gods

by R. A. Salvatore

  But she couldn’t stop. The compulsion was too great, for Aoleyn understood that she was becoming more intimate with the magic now than she had ever imagined.

  The powder pile was almost gone. Aoleyn’s hand moved tentatively now, as she moved the needle about her face, reveling in every sting, followed by the warm rush of healing magic.

  That night, the powder depleted, Aoleyn slept, more soundly than she had in weeks.

  She awakened the next day, if it was day, for she couldn’t know down here, refreshed, but unsure. Unsure of everything, wondering if it had all been a dream.

  She moved to the pool, but far from the waterfall, where the water was mostly still. She brought forth diamond light to view her reflection. She couldn’t make out much. She did see some lines, like an outline of some sort, but it was too dim in the watery mirror.

  Aoleyn had a better idea. She strengthened her diamond light so that it seemed like a midsummer day within her cave, then fell into her wedstone, fell through her wedstone, stepping out of her body, just enough to look back at her naked corporeal form.

  Had her spirit still been in that body, it would have taken her breath away, surely.

  For with the powder, Aoleyn had made the markings and delicate outline of a cloud leopard. Her body had been a canvas, the powder her ink.

  She went back into her body and listened for the song of the leopard paw, and heard it, so keenly, so beautifully.

  Aoleyn called it forth, looking again to her reflection in the water.

  The image of the cloud leopard glowed silvery, even the cat’s tail, which she had traced down the side and back of her left leg. Her own reflection faded behind it, and for a moment, she wondered if she had actually transformed into a great cat!

  To bolster that thought, her senses became more keen—she had known this sensation when she had possessed a cloud leopard one day on her spiritual travels—and her muscles tightened. She felt as if she could pounce, could spring up and touch the distant ceiling.

  She focused on the first tattoo, the paw print on her right palm, and called forth the magic there more powerfully. Her arm transformed, but that was all, as the rest of the enchantment dissipated.

  There was more she needed to learn here, she understood. Much more.

  But for now, there was nothing more to be done with this.

  She left the cavern that day, spiritually, climbing up through the veins of magical gem to the God Crystal. She found her owl and she possessed it and flew off, gliding about the mountainside, feeling refreshed, feeling free, feeling confident.

  And feeling quite happy when she saw Bahdlahn again, out foraging near his cave. Winter’s grip on Fireach Speuer had greatly diminished, Aoleyn realized. The lower regions, down near the lake, showed pines free of snow and patches of bare ground.

  She had been in this cavern for an entire season! She couldn’t know the exact time of year, of course, but it seemed clear to her that spring was drawing near.

  She caught a rabbit and dropped it by Bahdlahn’s cave entrance. She stole some food from the Usgar, and brought it to her secret friend.

  She flew back about the Usgar camp. They weren’t yet making preparations to go down the mountain and the snow was still deep up here, but not as deep, she believed, something she confirmed when she flew past the winter plateau, over to the east.

  Aoleyn’s shock nearly threw her from the owl’s mind. She saw a long slope, snow-covered, but covered, too, with bodies. Mountain goblins, the sidhe, she realized as she flew past low to the ground. They were frozen in the snow, most showing garish wounds Aoleyn suspected to be from an Usgar spear. It appeared as if she had missed a great battle.

  Who might have died in that skirmish, she wondered?

  She realized that she didn’t really care, and that indifference shocked her, but only briefly.

  She released the owl, then went home, to her mossy bed, and slept soundly.

  The next day, she studied her tattoos in her reflection again. She called upon the magic, and as it was enacting, spirit-walked out of her body, just a bit, to look back upon herself, to see the silvery glow of the cloud leopard image.

  She thought it beautiful, but more than that, Aoleyn thought her body beautiful. She saw it in a way she had never imagined before, as her body, the vessel of her being, of her spirit, of her thoughts.

  When she had started the tattoos, part of the action had been in defiance. It was forbidden for an Usgar woman to tattoo herself. Only a man could do that, and only a man could instruct his woman to do that.

  But no, the defiant mood didn’t seem to fit her now, Aoleyn understood. The image she had painted upon herself had nothing to do with the warriors, with Usgar, with anyone who was not … Aoleyn.

  Just Aoleyn.

  This was her canvas, her clay to be molded. Hers, only hers, to be given by her, to be withheld by her.

  By none other.

  Now she truly looked at herself under this new understanding, at the play of her muscles as she danced about, at the beauty of form.

  The unanticipated effect was not lost on the young woman. By scarring herself, she had claimed herself, wholly, completely.

  And now she knew. It wasn’t just magic, as if something as mundane as coaxing fire from dry leaves by running a bow drill. This was a different power, an inner clarity, a spiritual strength.

  Her tribe named that Usgar. To the lakemen, it was the work of a deamhan.

  Aoleyn shook her head. None of that mattered. Nay, she rejected it.

  This was her power, a manifestation of her spirit and will.

  And this was her body, just hers. It did not belong to a warrior, any warrior.

  That thought gave Aoleyn pause, as she remembered the ritual she had endured before her spiritual joining with Brayth, when he had pushed her over and raped her.

  Just remembering that brought forth the power of the tattoo once more, turning her arm into that mighty leopard paw.

  Aoleyn nodded, her face grim, but she was satisfied.

  She had never been more at home in her mortal coil.

  * * *

  The thought of leaving this cave did not sit well with Aoleyn. A big part of her wished she could spend the rest of her days here, basking in the music of magic—she could not bring herself to call it the song of Usgar any longer—and learning about herself as she learned the power of the enchanted gemstones.

  But spring was coming up above, she knew, and Bahdlahn was out there, alone and probably afraid, and likely very soon to be in grave danger.

  Besides, when Aoleyn actually considered the whole of her situation, she knew that there was more for her to learn, about herself and others and the wide world, out there than in here.

  A few days after her journey with the owl—it was impossible to track time accurately down here, but Aoleyn had slept three times since creating her tattoo—Aoleyn once more went forth from the place spiritually.

  She found her owl friend and set off, but this time focused more keenly on the Usgar encampment. The day was warm and sunny, and most of the tribe were out and about, beginning the earliest preparations for their move down the mountain.

  Aoleyn knew the routines quite well, and so it was easy for her to quietly fly into an empty tent and steal a few odds and ends: a small knife, a pair of metal spoons, and a silver necklace the tent’s occupant, Connebragh, sometimes wore.

  The owl flew up above Craos’a’diad and dropped the stolen pieces into the chasm.

  Aoleyn let the bird go free.

  Down the corridor she went, back out to the main chasm. She held her breath and looked back many times, but held her nerve, called upon her diamond for brilliant light, then called upon her malachite and jumped into the blackness. She enacted the levitational magic almost immediately, not having the nerve to trust the distance of the fall.

  Before she even got to the bottom, she found one of the spoons, caught on a small ledge. Down at the base of the chasm, she found the other
spoon, the knife, and the necklace.

  Now she used her malachite more powerfully, climbing the wall swiftly. Then, when she broke past the last twist in the chasm, she enacted her moonstone and flew up—right past the tunnels she had called home for the last month, and up higher, high enough to see the daylight with her own eyes for the first time since she had been thrown in here, and finally to the landing she had been on before, during her trial for the Coven.

  These tunnels she knew, and so she went boldly, calling upon the magic all about her to excite the crystals full of diamond flecks to brighten the way, as if lighting the magical lamps simply with her passage.

  She knew what she wanted and knew where to find it, and soon she was hard at work, crafting another piece of jewelry: a chain belt and wedstone wire, thin and delicate, with a single tassel that held a teardrop pendant of wedstone—a more concentrated and powerful block of that most important stone than anything she currently possessed. At the center of that teardrop, she set the orange gemstone she could use for stone shaping.

  She felt quite pleased when she tied the belt about her waist, using strands of wedstone to pierce it to her body and keep her intimately connected to the music. She thought to return to her cave, then, but changed her mind, for it was not cold up here at all, and Aoleyn explored and wandered, wondering what she might next craft.

  Before anything could come to mind, though, the young witch felt something unexpected.

  There was a music to the caves, a vibration, impossibly subtle to those who did not recognize it, but clear as a ringing bell to Aoleyn, attuned as she was to the crystals. On this day, unexpectedly, that typical song changed. Where before it had been a low buzz, now it was much louder; where before she had heard the rhythm only of the crystals themselves, suddenly the music coalesced into a more unified and powerful song, like a choir.

  Curious, Aoleyn made her way through the caves, heading toward the surface, toward the bottom of the great pit ceilinged by Craos’a’diad. As she climbed, she felt the music ebb and flow, but mostly she felt it grow stronger. Something on the surface, she decided, was causing this. Or someone, she strongly suspected.

  She came to the base of the pit and looked up through the mouth of Usgar. The sky far above was dim. Twilight, she figured. She felt the cold air flowing down from above, and nodded—even long after spring had come, which she believed it had not, the nights atop Fireach Speuer could be brutally cold.

  She flexed her leg, felt the last bits of soreness from her tattooing, and told herself that a soak in the hot water below would do her well.

  Aoleyn laughed at herself. It was just a deflection, an excuse. Winter was letting go up top, and something strange was occurring on the surface, almost certainly concerning the Coven. Bahdlahn needed her, or would soon—she could not forsake him.

  She hoped that she would find the opportunity to return to this place, to the cave below that had been as true a home to her as anything she had ever known. But now, she was ready, she decided.

  She called to the magic all around her, then focused her thoughts to those gems intimately pierced about her body. She narrowed her call again, and sought out the vibrations of her favorite stone, the malachite. A smile widened—she couldn’t help it—as she felt herself grow lighter and lighter until her feet lifted off from the ground. Up she floated, up into the cold, twilit air atop Fireach Speuer.

  She was shivering by the time she exited the chasm, but she didn’t dare enact her cloak of flames, for it would have marked her clearly to anyone about. She could no longer feel the vibrations of magic, as she had in the caverns below, but she could hear the song of the witches, and moving to the southeastern edge of this higher plateau, looking down on the Usgar winter plateau and the pine grove that held the sacred God Crystal, she could see them, the witches of the Coven, holding tiny diamond-flecked crystals in their outstretched and uplifted hands. They moved in a circle about the God Crystal, and each rotated as she went, creating tiny circles about the ring of the larger.

  Aoleyn maintained her levitational magic, and coaxed the moonstone of her belly ring to life, slowly flying down the mountainside, staying low so as to not present a silhouette against the darkening sky. She came down to the pine grove opposite the winter plateau, then carefully picked her way through, enacting a third gemstone, the diamond, but reversing its effect to create wispy shadows about herself, to better conceal herself.

  She could hear again now the music of the gems, the melodic hum of the crystalline energy, blending sweetly with the song of the witches.

  Aoleyn knew this song, the song of the holy day, the spring equinox.

  She came to the edge of the trees, peering in at the dancing witches, all dressed in short smocks of sheer material, clothing they only wore here in their rituals. She recognized Connebragh nearest her, moving away to the right, and Aoleyn counted until Connebragh had come all the way around.

  Eleven were dancing. Mairen stood in the center, near the God Crystal. Within the ring of witches, too, stood another, a young woman, barely more than a girl.

  “Moragh,” Aoleyn silently mouthed, recognizing her. She understood, then, the significance of this ritual. It wasn’t merely the dance of spring, which was no small thing in itself, but the Coven was also using this holy day to fill the void left by the death of Gavina and the subsequent heresy of Aoleyn.

  Moragh was to be the twelfth witch of the Coven, twelve serving the thirteenth, the Usgar-righinn, completing the circle.

  In the center, Mairen untied the top of her shift and lifted her arms. The God Crystal flared with red-orange light as Mairen’s smock fell away, leaving her naked to the night, and, more importantly, to the God Crystal.

  The dancing witches began to similarly move, one by one, in sequence down the line, lifting their arms, shedding their slight smocks, baring themselves to their god. The women rhythmically turned and whirled, gyrating and stepping-in, stepping-out from the circle of dancing, as the whole of the group continued its balanced turn about the object of their worship. Whenever one moved close to the centerpiece, the huge crystal protruding at an angle from the ground, she moved back in a deferential way, almost bowing, always with eyes low.

  Only Mairen, standing immediately behind the base of the angled crystal, kept her eyes high, to the growing stars in the night sky, and kept her arms high, as if beckoning to a higher power.

  And only Moragh wore her smock now, and Aoleyn noted that she had her arms in close before her, as if trying to cover further. Clearly uncomfortable, the young woman glanced left and right, never letting her eyes linger on any of the dancing naked witches for any length of time.

  Aoleyn, with her new insights and perspective, almost laughed aloud at that.

  The power of the gemstone magic tingled in the air, palpable and exciting. The dance increased in its pace, the song increased in volume.

  “Join us,” Mairen called above the song.

  “Join us,” each of the eleven recited in turn, one at a time, while the other sisters kept the melody flowing.

  Moragh’s discomfort remained, clearly, but she slowly untied the top of her smock, her lips moving only a bit as she slipped into the trance-like rhythms.

  That could have been her, Aoleyn thought. This was to be her destiny. She didn’t know what to think of that in that moment, however, as regret battled with determination, reminding her that she had come to know a different, and better, way, and a different and more thorough understanding of the crystal magic, and of herself, body and spirit.

  * * *

  Moragh knew that she should be unashamed of her naked body, here in this place and company, and without concern of petty vanity.

  She was accepted, fully so, Mairen and the others had assured her.

  Still, unused to such a ritual, she felt her cheeks burning, and hoped that the low light would hide her blush.

  The song of the night flowed into her heart and thoughts, and so she, too, began to sing—she could
n’t help it, it just flowed from her. She let her smock fall, then bent low to retrieve a pair of small crystals as she stepped out of it. They flared to light as she stood back up, lifting her arms, feeling the communal power of the Coven’s song and dance. Growing more comfortable with her nudity, she began to mimic the footwork of the others in their dance, and to turn, but she did not yet join the outer ring.

  With every turn, the steps of Moragh’s dance became less inhibited, and guided by powers unhindered by any of the imposed human modesty. Her whole body tingled with the energy, like little sparks of lightning tickling and teasing her skin, making her feel alive in every bit of body. She couldn’t deny the pleasure and the power.

  Her arms went out wide as she turned, the wind tickling her bare skin, her thick hair flowing behind her like an extension of her shadow.

  A cry of ecstasy surprised her and turned her attention to the center of the circle, to see Mairen wrapped about the God Crystal, hugging it close, her body trembling.

  Moragh stopped her dance, eyes unblinking, jaw hanging open, for then she understood. The flush of shame returned to her cheeks, but she fought it off.

  A sister moved beside her and ushered her to the outer ring, inviting her to fully join the dance, and Moragh complied and quickly resumed her footwork, turning and singing.

  The witch to her side then stepped in toward the God Crystal, to replace Mairen, who flashed Moragh a brief smile and nod as she fell into the line beside her.

  With her turn, Moragh glanced at that second sister, reclining upon the angled God Crystal, her head immediately going back and swaying, her eyelids heavy and half-closed.

  Moragh felt her cheeks flushing once more, and she understood. They would make their way around the circle, one by one, to find their place of worship and ecstasy with their god, Usgar, and her turn would come, last in the line, and then, only then when she had completed the ritual, would she become a witch of the Coven.

  * * *