by Sarah Hawke
What if the voice wasn’t really my mother at all?
“My instructors at the Spire said it took years for all the fractures to heal,” Sehris said in stunned horror. “The Templar were nearly wiped out by the Culling, so they couldn’t even leave a garrison behind. Watcher knows how many demons crossed over and escaped into the countryside…”
Delaryn swept her gaze back and forth across the fractures. “It must be the Pale-shifting,” she breathed. “Every time the Chol breach the Pale, they leave a crack in their wake. I bet the same thing is happening at Rimewreath—maybe even worse.”
That’s the problem of cracking open a door between worlds, she had warned herself back in Whitefeather Hold. You have no way of knowing what horrors could be waiting to sneak through from the other side.
“We can’t stay here,” Delaryn said, an icy chill racing down the back of her neck. “We have to warn Rohen and—”
A hauntingly familiar hissing sound echoed through the fort, and Delaryn froze in place as she glanced between the fractures. Several of them had begun to glow with an angry green light. She could feel the presence of something on the other side.
Something that was about to come through.
“Guardian protect us,” Sehris breathed as she thrust out her hands and summoned the Aether to her fingertips. A glowing, translucent barrier materialized around her slender body as she stared directly at the largest fracture looming in the air some thirty yards in front of them.
“Rohen!” Delaryn cried out, tilting her head to the tower. “Rohen, we need you—”
Her voice was drowned out when the angry hiss intensified into a shrill screech that was like long fingernails dragging across glass. The largest fracture doubled in size in the span of a heartbeat, and once again Delaryn could feel the presence of creatures she couldn’t actually see. A cacophony of dark, tormented whispers tugged at the corners of her mind just like when they had stepped through the Pale at Rimewreath, but this time the demons weren’t begging to escape.
They already had.
“Look out!” Sehris warned, springing backward and pointing at the base of the tower. A gust of unnaturally hot air blasted across Delaryn’s cheeks and a foul, sulfurous stench flooded her nostrils, but she still couldn’t see anything…at least, not until the corpses of Sundermount’s soldiers all suddenly began twitching as if they were alive.
“Oh, gods!” Delaryn gasped, a hundred different stories about the horrors of demonic possession flashing through her mind. Creatures from the Pale weren’t content to simply cross over—they needed mortal vessels to anchor themselves in the physical world. And if the legends were correct, they didn’t particularly care if that vessel was alive or dead.
“Get back!” Sehris shouted as she thrust out her hands and unleashed a rippling cascade of magical force directly in front of her. There were about a dozen walking corpses in total, all scattered around the base of the tower where the Chol had left them, and the dark elf’s concussive blast battered them away like fallen branches. Some crashed into the walls of the tower while others were simply knocked from their feet, but none of them stopped moving. Even the ones with broken, mangled legs somehow crawled back to their feet.
With the Aether already coursing through her, Delaryn plucked a cloud of vapor from the air and froze it into a long, jagged spear of ice. The instant the nearest corpse lurched back to its feet, she hurled the frozen lance right through its chest. Bones and rotten flesh burst from its back, but the demon-possessed body didn’t fall over—it turned and stared right at her, it’s crow-hollowed eye sockets searing with green, spectral flame almost as if it were a Chol.
Delaryn screamed. Prior to this moment, the malformed visages of the corrupted elves were easily the most hideous thing she had ever seen…but at least the Chol could be killed. Even the most insane, blood-crazed Dretch couldn’t ignore a gaping, frozen hole in the middle of its chest. A demon possessing a corpse—even a badly brutalized one—couldn’t be stopped so easily.
Or possibly at all.
As the demons all returned to their feet, Delaryn realized that their decaying vessels were already transforming. The wounds that had originally killed them sealed, their flesh regained its color, and even their eyes began to regrow in their empty sockets. After a few more seconds, the bodies looked indistinguishable from any other soldiers in Torisval.
“Burn them!” Sehris said, her hands trembling as she extended her protective barrier over Delaryn as well. “We have to burn the bodies!”
“I can’t!” Delaryn snarled. Acting on pure instinct, she shaped the freezing air into a thin, razor-sharp circle and hurled it at the nearest demon. The icy disk nearly sawed the possessed body in half, and it fell over amidst a shower of blood and gore…only to lurch back to its feet a few seconds later, the rupture in its torso already mending.
“Ilhari vlos!” Sehris hissed, scrambling to Delaryn’s side and standing back to back as the demons closed in around them. She unleashed another concussive blast of force, knocking the corpses away, but their time was growing short. The Flensing would eventually ravage them, but the demons would never relent…
“Guardian take you!”
Rohen’s deep voice cut through the din like the clarion call of a war horn, and Delaryn turned her head just in time to see him leap from the entrance to the tower and skewer one of the possessed corpses with his wraithblade. The blazing blue sword, already dispersed into the Pale, seared through its target with ease. The walking corpse screeched—a shrill, horrid, otherworldly sound—and then spontaneously burst into flames and disintegrated inside its armor.
Delaryn’s mouth dropped open at the sight of the blackened pile of ash. Varlothin couldn’t ignite wood, but apparently it could burn demons just fine.
And it did. Rohen whirled between the corpses, hacking them down and setting them aflame one by one. The risen soldiers fought back even harder than when they had been alive—the demons wearing their bodies gave them superior speed and strength to any mortal. What they lacked was the skill of a Templar.
Even having watched Rohen carve through the Chol at Whitefeather Hold and at Rimewreath, Delaryn was still awed by his movements. He fought with the grace of an elven dancer and the might of a Roskarim warrior. Delaryn did everything she could to buy him time—she shaped an icy wall around herself and Sehris to funnel the demons into a single path near Rohen, and she froze several of the possessed bodies in place just long enough for him to lunge forward and cut them down. The whole while, Sehris projected an Aetheric barrier over the Templar just in case the tip of a spear or sword slipped past his defenses.
A minute later, it was all over. The stench of rotting corpses had transformed into a cloud of acrid smoke, and there was nothing left of the Sundermount garrison aside from empty suits of armor, fallen weapons, and small piles of sulfurous ash.
“Maiden’s mercy,” Rohen said as he held his blade defensively in front of him and tried to catch his breath. “How in the bloody void…?”
“The Chol,” Sehris panted. “Whenever they travel through the Pale, they leave behind fractures in their wake. Demons are able to slip through.”
His shoulders slumped as if all the air had suddenly been sucked from his lungs. “As if the Culling weren’t enough…”
Delaryn shared a wary glance with Sehris. There was so much he needed to know, but she still wasn’t sure if she wanted to tell him about her mother’s voice. Gods, she didn’t even want to think about it herself…
What if Sehris is right? What if the voice does belong to a demon? What if I’ve been wrong about everything?
“I have no idea how to close the fractures or if it’s even possible,” Sehris said. “We should grab whatever supplies we can and get out of here. Without bodies to possess, any other demons that cross over shouldn’t be able to linger in this realm for long.”
Rohen swore under his breath as he shifted Varlothin back into the physical world. “There’s some fo
od and camping supplies in the tower.”
“Let’s grab whatever we can carry,” Delaryn said, trying and failing to ignore the burning terror in the pit of her stomach. “We need to get out of here.”
Interlude
There wasn’t a single wisp of smoke rising from the courtyard of Whitefeather Hold, and every single wall and tower was completely intact. From a distance, one might have assumed that the castle had simply been abandoned like so many other structures here in the vast winter wasteland of Torisval.
Up close, however, blood told the tale that fire could not.
“No one survived,” Inaril said from behind the cowl of his thick forest-green cloak.
“Did you check the second level?” Yria asked, blowing warm air into her cold hands. The midday sun was almost blinding, yet somehow it seemed utterly devoid of heat. “They could have—”
“I checked everything. The servant’s quarters, the storage rooms, the chapel…some of the bodies had been ripped out of crates and closets. The humans tried to hide, but the Chol tore them apart.”
Yria closed her eyes and tried not to be sick. If it weren’t so cold here in the shadow of the mountains, the stench of death would have been overpowering. But most of the corpses here in the courtyard had frozen so solid that the crows hadn’t even gotten to them yet.
The bodies inside the keep wouldn’t be as well preserved. She was honestly surprised that her companion hadn’t retched.
“The king?” she asked, even though she knew the answer.
“Dead alongside his guards,” Inaril said, shifting his gaze to the slaughtered horses and stable boys. “The bodies were all intact and unsullied. It does not make any sense…”
Yria nodded silently. The fact that the Chol hadn’t even bothered to gnaw on the corpses of their victims was genuinely bizarre. The monsters had swept in like a poisonous mist, killing everything in sight, then dispersing into the breeze. They shouldn’t have even been here in the first place—the bulk of the horde was thirty miles away on the other side of Lake Hollanshir. Yet somehow a few hundred Dretches had found their way to this ancient castle and slaughtered everyone inside, including the recently crowned High King of Darenthi.
What had started as an intelligence-gathering mission on behalf of the Waxing Throne had suddenly turned into something far darker. Yria and Inaril were Eyes of the Queen, not scavengers.
“I didn’t find the body of the Whitefeather girl anywhere,” Inaril added after a moment, “but some of the Chol were killed by magic. There wasn’t much left of the corpses…one of them could have belonged to her or the orphan.”
Yria gritted her teeth. “We can’t leave until we find a body. The Queen will want to know for certain.”
“I am not going back in there,” Inaril said, shaking his head. “And we cannot afford to linger. The Chol could have already sensed us by now.”
“I’m not afraid of those monsters.”
“That’s because you’re young and foolish. It is time for us to leave.”
She turned to glare at him, but he had already started walking toward their horses tied up by the main gate. As annoyed as she was, she couldn’t bring herself to scold him. He was her commanding officer, but he also didn’t have a personal stake in this like she did. To him, Rohen Velis was just another servant of the violent, oppressive religious cult who ruled Darenthi. Inaril knew what the Scryers had revealed about Rohen’s true nature—and what they had prophesized about the destiny of the last Whitefeather. But like many of the old guard in Nelu’Thalas, Inaril was skeptical of anyone with a trace of human blood, even those touched by the power of the Valayar.
Just like Yria herself.
“I’m going to take one last look inside,” she said, plucking her bow from her back.
Inaril turned to face her, his full-blooded blue eyes glowing faintly beneath the shadows of his hood. “Ten minutes,” he said. “After that, we ride east for the Weald.”
Yria nodded and dashed for the keep. She preemptively covered her mouth with her hunting mask before she slipped inside the main doors and she was immediately glad she did. The stench was overpowering, and the carnage was every bit as gruesome as Inaril described. She whispered a thankful prayer to the Moonmaiden that the Hold had only been at a quarter capacity, otherwise she would have been tripping over corpses in the halls.
Yria followed the trail of destruction to the body of King Thedric Ashellion, the “prince of destiny” who had won a war to reclaim his family’s throne only to die an ignoble death a few short years later. The body of his wife was nowhere to be found, however, but Yria could still feel a faint magical echo where a great storm of magical power had been unleashed. As a rule, the humans locked their sorcerers away in Gûl Ostaraad, the ancient Avetharri spire to the south, but the Whitefeather girl had managed to conceal her powers from the Tel Bator. The Scryers had known the truth about her for many years, naturally, but they hadn’t been eager to share that information with the humans for obvious reasons.
Yria couldn’t help but wonder if the girl had lost control of her magic and annihilated herself—it wouldn’t have been the first time an untrained sorcerer had met such a fate. Perhaps that explosion of power had killed Rohen as well…
“Wait,” Yria breathed when she noticed a trail of dried bloody droplets leading from the king’s corpse back into the corridors. She followed on a whim, and from the occasional smudged boot print, it was clear that someone had survived the battle with the Chol. The trail led her toward and then through the castle library, and she kept expecting to find a bled-out corpse around a corner. Instead, she found a small, out-of-the-way side chamber that was sealed off by a half-shattered wall of ice.
Frowning, Yria squatted down next to the makeshift barricade. With the doors and windows of the keep smashed open, the air was apparently just cold enough to keep it from melting. The Chol had battered their way through, and it only took a moment to figure out why.
There was another way out of the castle.
Yria’s heart raced in anticipation as she leapt over the barricade. The trapdoor on the other side led into an ancient crypt, and she used the glowing runes on her bow as a makeshift lantern as she followed the bloody trail around dozens of dusty sarcophagi. Gusts of freezing air whipped through the chamber, rippling the spiderwebs and kicking up centuries worth of dust. She followed the wind to a large, open stone door, and a single glance confirmed that the passage led up into the mountains.
Someone escaped. By the gods, someone escaped!
Smiling, Yria spun around and started to leave—then stopped when she saw a silver-white tiara resting atop the sarcophagus closest to the passage.
“Faarea,” she breathed, picking it up. Her smile grew, and she sprinted back to Inaril at the main gate. He was already waiting for her on his horse when she arrived.
“We’ve been here too long,” he said, his eyes locked on the horizon. “We should…” His voice trailed off when he saw the crown in her hand. “Where did you find that?”
“In the crypts beneath the keep,” Yria told him. “The Whitefeather girl escaped, and I would bet anything that Rohen is with her.”
Inaril frowned. “You don’t know that. His body could have—”
“I know,” Yria said. “He’s alive, Inaril. All we have to do is find him.”
Her commander turned back to the horizon and sighed. “We can’t afford to waste any more time chasing after one man, not with the Chol on our doorstep.”
“We need to find him because the Chol are on our doorstep,” Yria said. “You know what the Scryers said about him. We’re going to need his help. I have to find him.”
She glanced down at the tiara and took a long, deep breath. “I have to bring my brother home.”
2
Crossroads
Even several hours after Rohen and the girls had left the massacre at Fort Sundermount behind them, he still caught himself glancing back over his shoulder every few minutes.
Knowing that the Chol were out there—and that they could walk through walls—was harrowing enough, but at this point, his thoughts were mostly focused on the demons who had crossed over. Templar were trained to fight the horrific monsters of the Pale, but that didn’t make them any less unsettling. The very thought of an invisible creature possessing a corpse and wearing it like a cloak…
Rohen shivered involuntarily. Before this morning, he hadn’t fought a demon since he and a few other Templar had put down an infestation in a village outside of Shadowcrest about a year ago. The monsters had possessed half a dozen people, and if the Templar hadn’t destroyed them, they might have eventually been able to tear open a larger breach in the Pale. Rohen and his comrades had ultimately been victorious, thank the Guardian, but the experience still haunted his nightmares to this day. Stabbing a Chol was one thing—they looked monstrous and ravenous and wicked—but driving his blade through the heart of a possessed villager was something else entirely. If he closed his eyes, he could still hear one of the possessed stable boys pleading to be spared…and it was only after the body had vaporized from Varlothin’s touch that Rohen had finally been sure that he had killed a demon and not an innocent kid.
We’re lucky we reached Sundermount when we did. If we had arrived any later, the demons might have already possessed the corpses. Those soldiers would have greeted us with bright eyes and smiling faces as if nothing were wrong. Gods, they probably would have offered us supplies and tried to help us on our way—anything to get away from a Templar before their true nature was revealed. Thank the gods we killed them before they fully adopted their human guises.
Rohen shivered again as he led the others southeast along the edge of the Sundered Spine. The wind was less bracing here, thanks to the mountain walls around them, and the sun was bright and blazing in the clear blue sky. The frosted peaks and snow-dusted trees would have all been breathtakingly beautiful under different circumstances, but right now he just wanted a fire, a warm bed, and enough mead to forget the horrors of the past day.
