by Frank Morin
“I do this for you, Verena,” he said softly.
Blinking away tears, he shattered the bridges to granite, smashing through all three levels. An enormous influx of energy poured into him, staggering him from its magnitude that eclipsed even what he had received from those elemental bridges. Granite was his first affinity, and that seemed to hold so much more power, just as obsidian had for the queen.
Connor checked the elfonnel, and shouted a Grandurian curse that Erich had taught him. Still not enough. He was destroying himself from the inside, and it wasn’t enough!
He couldn’t stop now. Hating the unyielding duty that drove him, Connor smashed the bridges to diorite, gasping when the energy influx rippled through him with the lightning-like strength of strum. With diorite gone, he crossed to his secondary islands and stopped at blind coal. He didn’t pause to think, but smashed apart all three bridges and captured all their energy.
Chert was a possibility, but he sensed it didn’t contain as much energy as his other affinities. He felt exhausted, emotionally wrung out by the self-induced torture, but he needed more power and he was just about out of time.
He was almost out of bridges too.
Connor considered limestone and sandstone again. He needed more power, but couldn’t just sunder all three levels. He sensed through basalt that his connection to stilling still existed, so the risk he took in smashing the lower-level bridges to basalt seemed to have paid off. He didn’t have much choice, so he shattered the first two levels of limestone.
Connor’s mind returned to the Tir-raon, to the battle where his army was attacked by all the others. They’d used Solas and prism lanters to blind all their enemies. That had been the first hint that maybe limestone was far more powerful than anyone believed. His enormous rampager body began to glow as it swelled with the influx of limestone affinity fission power. Connor still felt a spike of fear. If he’d just broken his connection to fission, he’d just doomed himself. Barely able to breathe, he jumped to the remaining bridge to limestone.
There! He sagged with relief when he felt his connection to limestone still there, still strong. He could still feel all the affinity-fission energy he’d captured, still manipulate it. He might have lost the ability to manipulate light, but he was still in the fight. With that higher level of limestone, he could still access mirage and death beam too.
He still wasn’t quite strong enough though, and the only affinity that might hold enough was sandstone.
Connor crossed to that island and ran his fingers over the bridges, thinking of the countless times sandstone had saved his life. Could he really destroy it?
Fleshcrafting was already dormant. Chances of them deciding to sacrifice another Petralist in elfonnel form at the convergence point so he alone could enjoy fleshcrafting again were low, but still he hesitated.
Stopping now would mean all the other sacrifices were wasted.
Gritting his teeth, Connor carefully smashed away the top-level bridge to sandstone, casting fleshcrafting away forever. He snatched every iota of power released by sacrificing that bridge and shook with the influx of new power. His body swelled further, reaching nearly three hundred feet tall, a titanic monster, unique to the world. His rampager form thrummed with power, and every deadly inch of him shuddered with the need to move, to use some of the vast amounts of power rushing through him and threatening to tear himself apart.
It seemed impossible he wasn’t strong enough to destroy anything in the world he needed to, but when he cast his senses back up into the sky, he wanted to howl with despair. The sacrifices were indeed helping. He sensed that the power he could unleash had very nearly caught up with the energy building within the queen elfonnel, but it was still a little too low.
While he hesitated, facing the beloved bridge to sandstone, he reached a hand to his throat, imagining Aunt Ailsa’s pendant hanging about his neck. He thought of the first time he knowingly tapped sandstone, during that crazy battle on the slope near Alasdair when he’d succumbed to double-tap sickness. He’d saved himself, then many others. He thought of that tender moment when he’d healed Verena’s leg and she’d kissed him.
He tried not to think about how he’d been the one who broke her leg, or that she’d been in Carbrey’s custody, facing torture and death. He thought of the sculpted sandstone pendants Ailsa had taken such great risks to gift to him, and all the trouble he’d caused by allowing Jok to get his hands on one. He thought of the lives he’d changed in the short time he’d gained access to fleshcrafting. He’d healed Ilse and dear Jean, and all of Jean’s patients, and the memories made him smile.
“Pack leader!” Porphyry growled, looking up, and Connor cast his senses beyond himself, expecting to feel the queen elfonnel drawing dangerously close, perhaps reaching out with another lightning barrage.
She wasn’t, but was turning away.
East. Toward Lossit valley and his friends.
Water’s last angry words returned to haunt him. She was angry. They all were, and they intended to carry out their threats to destroy everyone he loved, then kill him last.
“I don’t think so,” Connor growled.
He brought his curse-laden fist down with all his might on the remaining sandstone bridges.
65
The Final Threshold
Connor blinked his eyes open and just had to howl, his voice rising over the wind to shake the air. He was so full of life, his enormous rampager form shuddered with energy. It took all of his control to keep from leaping into the air and unleashing that power in a devastating wave.
Plus, he was actually falling.
His affinity with air was gone, so he lacked the power to reach for the currents whistling past. The loss of his affinities was a deep ache in his heart, but in his current form, a fall of a few thousand feet didn’t concern him. In fact, he wished he could fall faster because he couldn’t give chase to the queen elfonnel until he reached the ground.
She was moving fast, shooting east and drawing the boiling storm clouds with her. She had grown larger, a giant, glowing monster out of nightmare, wreathed in lightning, her Dreokt features twisted with rage. Connor sensed only whispers of the queen through chert. The elementals had almost entirely consumed her, and with her affinities gone, she lacked the ability to fight them.
They weren’t completely free yet, though. When he smashed the queen’s bridges, he’d pushed closed most of the gateway to the real world. The elementals were still pressing through, if more slowly, taking control over the elfonnel, fighting for freedom, but stuck in the tiny opening.
The queen elfonnel bellowed, “See the fruits of your folly, mortal!”
It raised its many lightning-bolt arms, pointing them toward the east. It looked like it was preparing to unleash another lightning barrage against the unprotected armies. Connor tried to stop it, but he couldn’t feel strum or magnis. He’d broken the bridges to water and fire and locked himself out.
He couldn’t stop it.
Desperately, Connor cast his thoughts to the east and felt Verena’s mind like a warm beacon. He touched her thoughts and felt a flood of relief. She was awake. The connection snapped into place, and he smiled to feel her surprise.
“Connor, you’re alive!” she cried.
“Tell everyone to beware. You might get hit by another lightning blast.”
“Can you stop it?” she asked nervously.
“Maybe. This is my last chance, and I won’t let it get away this time.”
“Connor, please be safe,” she urged.
His safety wasn’t important. All he cared about was protecting her. When he didn’t immediately respond, she asked, “Connor?”
“I love you. Be safe. I have to go.”
“I love you,” she said, pouring all of her heartfelt emotion across the link to him. It helped bolster his confidence. He would stop the elementals. He wouldn’t quit until he won.
Time to end the monster.
Connor hit the ground, absor
bing the impact easily on his giant rampager legs and immediately launching himself after the elfonnel. It had paused high in the air, just beneath the roiling storm clouds, with shrieking wind whipping all around it, lightning bolts crackling all along its torso, but it hadn’t unleashed the barrage.
Instead, the queen elfonnel began to change. Connor didn’t need elemental senses to understand what was happening. Crimson fires began racing along the elfonnel’s torso, while water rippled up one of its arms. Earth formed a helmet over its huge head, and air whistled through the lightning bolts, magnifying the whirlwind under its torso.
In their desperate eagerness to reach ultimate freedom, the elementals were fighting each other. The doorway was tight, and none of them seemed willing to let the others through first. The queen elfonnel shuddered and trembled as the various elementals wormed their way into it, clearly arguing amongst themselves just as they had when Connor raised his elfonnel. No doubt they would work things out in a moment, but in that second, their greed for freedom gave Connor his one opening.
So he focused on the wild torrent of energy coursing through him and max-tapped limestone to concentrate it further. He was already filled to bursting with power, a combination of raw energy he’d sucked in from the storm, plus the pure affinity-fission energy from the ruptured bridges. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was made of, but sensed it was a more refined frequency of sylfaen power than he’d ever wielded, and that it could indeed hurt the elemental creatures.
With all his strength, he compressed that energy, mixing it together, concentrating it, and magnifying its frequency. His entire body shuddered with violent spasms as the pressure to release the power grew to the point it took all of his superhuman strength to contain it.
Ratcheted up to such high frequency, some energy began bleeding away, radiating out of the intense core and seeping into his flesh. It was so powerful it tore at the fabric of his muscles and bones, threatening to rip them asunder. Connor groaned from the effort and the blossoming pain, grinding his sharp teeth together as he fought to hold on long enough to aim his one strike.
If he missed, all was lost.
His vision reddened, his breath came in ragged gasps, and in his mind Porphyry growled, “Strike, Pack Leader, or we die!”
Aiming his muzzle at the distant elfonnel, Connor howled, casting every bit of that pent-up energy at his enemy, focusing the beam as tight as he possibly could.
It shot away, an invisible death beam more destructive than anything the world had ever seen. To the east, several thousand feet higher, the lightning elfonnel was just trumpeting in victory. Had the elementals reached an accord, decided how to share the monster and take the final step into the world?
Too late.
Connor’s death beam struck it and consumed it.
The core of the monster was already made of plasma, surrounded by lightning, although parts of it had transformed into the various elements vying for control over it. Connor’s death beam ripped through it like a rampager through paper, shredding its component bits to their tiniest molecules, then ripping those apart too.
Some of those bits ruptured at their most basic level, just as particles had ruptured down in the mantle of the planet when he hit them with that death beam. The rupturing particles unleashed a vast explosion, multiplying the deadly torrent already ripping through the monster.
White-hot fire engulfed the writhing queen elfonnel, and invisible energy millions of times stronger tore at it and erupted outward in every direction. Connor deflected it up into the clouds before it could roll over the land and rip out the lives of everyone for hundreds of miles. The blast boiled up into the clouds, shredding them, but also magnifying the storm a thousandfold.
The queen elfonnel screamed, its voice a mixture of all of the elementals and Queen Dreokt herself, and her mind struck Connor’s with startling force. Through the connection, he sensed how she had become the gateway to the world, her mind broken and twisted and transformed into an opening, rimmed with green energy. The elementals were there, clinging to the frame as the torrent of energy blasted against them. The queen was dying, the last vestiges of her innermost being tearing apart, so the gateway was crumbling, but the elementals were still not letting go.
“Just leave!” Connor shouted at them, enraged by their tenacity. If they somehow withstood the barrage ripping the elfonnel apart, could they reconstitute it, preserve some part of the queen’s life long enough to still push into the world.
“You cannot deny us,” Water responded, her voice tight with strain.
Connor reached for more power, determined to strike through the conduit of chert and break their hold on the world, but he had nothing left. He’d thrown it all at the queen elfonnel. He was exhausted, his body shaking with fatigue and shrinking fast. He had consumed all but the last vestiges of porphyry, and he felt the connection about to snap. Would that kill him or revert him back to his weak human form?
It didn’t matter. He’d be left completely spent, unable to fight them.
“Pack Leader, I will do this,” Porphyry said.
“How?” Connor could smash the bridges to porphyry, but hadn’t even considered it. He needed porphyry’s strength to fight the elementals, but he was about to lose his connection anyway, and he didn’t have any more porphyry. Unless he found the secret quarry for the rare power stone, he’d never again awaken the rampager. He could destroy those bridges, but he didn’t want to.
“We are the pack, and we will always be the pack,” Porphyry said, appearing beside Connor, his deadly monster form glowing softly in the energized air. “I will fight for the pack leader.”
“I don’t understand,” Connor admitted, but he was out of time. His strength was failing, the explosion tearing the elfonnel apart fading, and the elementals were still not gone.
“Speak the command, and I will fight. Then you will see,” Porphyry said simply.
What did he have to lose?
“Fight for me,” Connor urged the monster.
Porphyry howled with bloodlust and leaped away, flashing across the distance to the dying elfonnel, transforming into a flash of red light, like a lightning bolt that pierced the monster’s chest. At the same time, Porphyry leaped down the conduit of chert to the queen’s broken mind. Connor caught a glimpse of the enraged rampager diving into the elementals clustered at the tiny gateway, jaws agape, claws raking.
All of the elementals screamed as Porphyry plowed into them, and with a flash of green light, they disappeared. The gateway shuddered and imploded.
The queen elfonnel’s boy shuddered, then ruptured, and it must have lost control over all those built-up charges of strum because an enormous lightning bolt ripped up from the ground and speared up through the monster. It burst right through in a blinding cascade of sparks as hundreds of lightning bolts erupted from the elfonnel, shooting up into the roiling storm clouds. Wind and lightning and thunder shrieked in every direction, shaking the air so violently Connor stumbled and fell. The crashing sounds clobbered him so hard he screamed, the mighty roar mingling with the creature’s elemental death knell.
The essence of the unstoppable elfonnel erupted up into the storm clouds, generating vast sheets of lightning that arced between the clouds, triggering a hailstorm so intense the ice nearly penetrated Connor’s thick hide. Wind howled in every direction and Connor’s form shrunk as he expended the last of his energy.
He huddled on the ground under the brutal onslaught of the unleashed storm, amazed by the sheer magnitude of it. The last of his porphyry winked out, and he screamed again as a wave of agony coursed through him and his body transformed back to human. He groaned, so far beyond exhausted, he couldn’t sit up, couldn’t crawl for shelter. The hail and freezing rain soaked him, and he shivered from the brutal cold.
Was she gone? Were they gone? Had it worked?
Queen Dreokt touched his mind, the chert connection so faint it was barely a whisper, but it was there, and Connor felt crushed
by hopelessness. He’d failed after all.
“Death is the final threshold,” she said, her voice weak but more sane than it had ever sounded.
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” he responded, daring to hope she was really dying.
“You always were an insolent child, but today I am free!” she chortled.
“Um, aren’t you dying?” he asked, surprised by the joy he sensed from her.
“Of course I am. My body is gone, my elfonnel shattered, but the usurpers of my mind are gone. You saved me from them, spared me the fate I have feared for centuries. For that I am indebted to you, boy.”
“It was my pleasure,” he said, exulting that she was really dying.
“Don’t you dare gloat,” she warned, the reprimand strong in her fading voice. “You might have prevented the destruction of all things, but it’s your fault we got into this mess in the first place.”
“Hey!” Connor objected, but she spoke right over him.
“I am just glad I won’t be around to see the mess you make of the world.”
He voice faded to laughter, which trailed away to nothing.
Connor lay on the ground, looking up into the strengthening storm, ignoring the rain and hail beating on him. The last fragments of the queen elfonnel were dispersing up through the storm, and without fleshcrafting and with no body left, not even Queen Dreokt could recover from that. She might have been mighty, but that storm was greater sill, and it consumed all that was left of her.
She was gone!
Connor allowed a weary smile, but then a larger hailstone cracked into his forehead so hard he yelped. She might be gone, but she was making a mess of things, as usual.
The storm was still growing, the winds raging so hard they threatened to yank Connor right off the ground and swallow him up. The icy rain and hail was mixed with snow and sleet, as if the storm couldn’t decide what it wanted to beat him with.
