Fury Lingers: Book One of The Foreseen Trilogy

by Ethan Spears

  He dashed forward, yanking his sword out and tossing the sheath behind him. He had a small window. His heart beat with his own steps. If Magragda saw him, that was probably it. But he closed the distance without any attempt to stop him. He planted his foot hard and leaped, higher and farther, he felt, than he had ever leaped before. He lifted his blade overhead with both hands, placed one hand on the pommel, and stabbed downwards with all the force he could muster. It plunged into the crook of Magragda’s elbow all the way to the hilt, and the arm buckled. Aoden’s legs collided hard with Magragda’s arm, sending him spinning through the air and landing roughly on the far side. He rolled through the dirt, but he leapt up as soon as he was able, ready to evade any retaliation.

  “Mendoro!” he shouted, but it wasn’t Mendoro who was waiting for Magragda, but Garnis, raising the spare blade just as Magragda came crashing down. The sword vanished into the giant’s exposed neck and he wrenched the blade to the side, opening a crimson gash as long as he could reach. A torrent of blood gushed from Magragda’s throat and he sounded a horrible, gurgling roar. His club hand shot out and struck Garnis in the side, sending him hurtling into the woods. Magragda reared back, his hands scrabbling at his throat, eyes bulging, tongue rolling about. He put his good foot down and tried to stand, but all he managed to do was fall over sideways, spilling an ankle-deep pool of blood from his mouth. His head struck the ground, his eyes rolled back, and after one last fitful spasm, he was still.

  Aoden sat catching his breath. His ankle was sore, but he was able to stand. He went to get his sword from the giant’s arm, only to find the blade had snapped off at the hilt. Forgetting about the sword, he took a moment to stretch his arms, legs, neck, and back, all sore from the tumble he had taken. He ran his hands down his sides, checking for any tender spots that might mean broken bones, but aside from what promised to become an extensive collection of bruises, he was fine. He found that even Dorim’s bottle of garlic sauce had miraculously survived intact.

  It was then, looking at the giant’s face, that he saw the glitter of gold on his nose: a peculiar nose ring. He approached for a better look.

  It was a golden idol, a bit smaller than Aoden’s fist, latched into place by little golden clasps. He loosened it and examined the carvings on it: a squashed face and round eyes, a big mouth full of square teeth, overall possibly the ugliest depiction of a monkey he had ever seen. Such a striking piece of jewelry would be easily recognized as Magragda’s. It would make a fine trophy, proof of their victory over the giant.

  He stumbled back towards Mendoro, still sitting on the ground with his sword in his hand, panting. “That was a foolish and dangerous thing you did,” Aoden said, though he was smiling. “You did well, Mendoro.” He offered the elf a hand which was gladly accepted.

  “Thank you, Commander. I was more than happy to put this sword to use,” he said. “It helped kill a giant! Maybe I should give it a name. That’s what people do with their swords, right?” Aoden laughed and, leaning against one another, they were able to walk back to the squad

  The elves were scattered about the woods, resting against trees or leaning on their bows, most bleeding from where they were struck by debris. Aoden raised the idol in the air so that everyone could see it. A few shouted ‘Shodan!’ but most were too fatigued or stressed to do anything but stare. “This little bauble will be our way of telling the world that Magragda the Swift wasn’t swift enough. An incredible feat, men. You worked together splendidly. I’ve never been so proud.” He glanced around, still panting. “Where’s Garnis? As the dealer of that exquisite killing blow, he should be the one to hold it high as we arrive at camp.”

  “Commander,” called Dorim. The lieutenant was squatting by a tree, a body twisted on the ground beside him. He shook his head. “He struck the tree head-on. It was likely instantaneous.”

  Aoden stared dumbly at this information. He thrust the trinket into the hands of a nearby elf and limped over to Garnis’s body. The head was a mass of flesh, unrecognizable, but other than that his body didn’t have a mark on it.

  But we won, he thought. The killing blow was dealt. It was over. It was done.

  The other elves stood and walked towards them, limping and bleeding as they were, some only now realizing what had happened. A murmur passed between them as they stood there, hands finding shoulders and mouths uttering prayers. They would begin mourning shortly, but for now, they were in shock. The elves, many of whom had served with Garnis for a hundred years, circled the body, awaiting some words from their commander, though they were slow in coming.

  But it was over.

  Chapter 10

  Speed and Doubt

  Mergau felt the spell waning but held on to the last threads of it with all her will. Her hand was clamped so hard around the other that her nails drew blood from her palms, but she held on.

  She felt a familiar sting on the back of her head and a scolding voice, as distant and imposing as a mountain. Her attention was on the window she peered through, shimmering in the air before her and closing despite her efforts. The vision through the window was blurring as it closed, but she still saw him, walking away from her, a yellowish blur against green. His hand idly rubbed his neck as he turned to look behind him, to look right through the window, and Mergau’s heart burned with hatred when she saw his face.

  “That is enough!” shouted Ezma, and the window snapped shut, its power dissipating. Mergau wanted to complain about the interference but was far too busy collapsing onto the floor to bother. “What have I told you about overextending your powers, foolish girl? And are you going to overflow with rage every time you see the elf?”

  Mergau’s head throbbed, and her hands tingled in that strange way that they did when she focused too much magic in them, like thousands of tiny things were nibbling at the flesh. She noticed there was blood on the ground again but wasn’t sure whence it had come, whether her palms or nose or mouth or ears. She darkly considered that she hadn’t bled from the eyes yet so maybe today would be the day she bled from the last of her five senses and completed the set.

  “Honestly, what hope do you have for your petty vengeance if you cannot control your magic or yourself?”

  “If it’s so petty,” Mergau snapped, “then why do you bother with me?”

  “Because your life is bigger than your vengeance,” said Ezma, tossing a rag at the fallen girl. “You will kill yourself at this rate, and even someone as thick-headed as you should understand that you need to be alive to attain vengeance.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” muttered Mergau. She received another sharp smack on the back of the neck from the switch.

  “One ‘yeah’ will suffice. Clean yourself up, we’re done with magic for today.”

  It was still too early to stop for the night, but Mergau didn’t put up a fight. She knew better than to argue on days when she lost control and hurt herself. Ezma was extremely strict about that. She had become strict about a lot of things, in fact. The deeper they moved into complex magical topics, the less forgiving Ezma became of errors and the more she doled out harsh words and physical punishment.

  Mergau ran the towel over her face, but it came away covered only with sweat. Her palms weren’t bleeding badly enough to make such a mess on the floor, so where was the blood coming from?

  She understood when she got to her feet and felt the warmth trailing down her thigh. She lifted her dress and found a thick wetness between her legs. She dabbed at it with her towel, not knowing how she should feel: she was strangely more comfortable with bleeding from the head, the kind of bleeding that occurs when one is struck or takes a grievous wound, expected of the challenges she faced; bleeding down there was more natural but also more personal. She’d been bleeding for years, but it was not supposed to be this much blood at once. It was the first time since that first nosebleed that she felt truly injured.

  She cleaned herself in silence, the towel growing ever darker red. Causing herself to bleed this badly from such a pl
ace left her more frustrated than anything, her own blood trying its best to remind her that she was a woman and that magic wasn’t meant for her. She scrubbed all the harder. Magic is for me, she thought, looking over at Ezma, who was writing at her desk. She’s more powerful than any man I’ve seen. No matter what Jierta or Arix and the other elders believe, her strength proves that magic isn’t the sole domain of men.

  Mergau only had the one dress, having brought no other clothing with her, but Ezma made a point of not cleaning the blood out of it. ‘Every time you lose yourself to your magic, you are failing,’ she scolded Mergau after the first time. ‘Let these stains be a reminder of your failures.’ Having the brown of dried blood around her crotch wasn’t particularly appealing, so she looped the towel around herself and tied it together, much like the cloths she would wrap Tana in when he was a baby, then pulled her dress down over it. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it would do so long as Ezma didn’t see her wearing it.

  “You’re improving, but you’re still misapplying Almon’s principle when forming the frame,” Ezma said over dinner, fulfilling her need for castigations along with her belly. “Remember, if you close the loop it should be able to sustain itself without you needing to reapply your magic. The only time you should use more power is to cancel the spell. You’re also doing nothing to hide your spell: not only could I see the window despite making no effort to intrude upon your casting, but the elf sensed it as well, and he can’t even use magic. You must not forget that a collapsing spell gives off a clear signature to those around it, which is why you must cancel it manually. That was a colossal failure of focus.”

  “I was hoping you didn’t notice that,” grumbled Mergau.

  “You should hope I do. What sort of miserable mage would I be if I couldn’t detect such blatant magic? And what sort of teacher doesn’t correct her student? If I left you be, half of this valley would be scorched to glass. Hurry up with your meal so we can move on to theory.”

  Their schedule had been shifting a lot lately. After that first day when she created the light, they went straight into theory. Mergau tried to make the light again but couldn’t bring her emotions under the necessary level of control without the aid of the incense, spell, or whatever it was Ezma had used to unnaturally calm her. ‘What is important is that you learned the feel,’ Ezma said at the time. ‘Once you become more familiar with the theories of magic, you will be able to replicate that spell without needing to be as calm. Once you become more experienced, you may even be able to channel your emotions themselves into your spells.’

  Mergau clearly wasn’t at that point because every time she saw the elf’s face during the scrying spell, it immediately fell apart.

  Theory boiled down to Ezma standing and speaking, drawing with chalk on a flat, black rock she brought from the other room that stretched from floor to ceiling. On it, she wrote the names of the various theorems, principles, and laws understood by mages, drew runes used in spells and diagrams to show their placement in proper rituals, and tapped impatiently when Mergau’s mind wandered. Not that Mergau intended for that to happen, it was just that this method was rigorous and strict, far different from how she was taught as a child when adults would put something in her hand, like a sewing needle, and order her to imitate them. Mergau had done well enough watching and learning, but this method of listening and memorizing and applying it all later forced her to pay more attention than she was used to.

  Theory was scheduled to take their entire evenings with only a half hour reserved for practice afterward (‘if you don’t get it right away, you won’t get it today’) but after nearly twelve days of study, Mergau was able to make the light again. After two more days, she succeeded on every attempt.

  After that, practice came first and theory was pushed to the end of the day. Her morning regimen was the same exercise, but it was dealt with quickly, hardly taking more than a half hour; even the run only took eighteen minutes these days, and Mergau stopped needing the recovery potion a week ago. After a quick bath, it was straight to magical practice, putting to use the new stances, incantations, and handwork. When Ezma felt satisfied with that day’s work, they moved on to theory, which was silent reading as often as not now that the basics were out of the way.

  Mergau’s Krik was almost perfect by now, or so she felt. She rarely had to ask what certain words meant anymore, often figuring them out through context or using the provided dictionary. Sometimes she had to thumb through Osotki’s Magic Compendium or Newman’s Eldritch Language Companion Vol. CLXXVII for some of the more obscure terms, or one of the older volumes for words that had since become obsolete. Steadily, she came to know the various masters and scholars of ages past who were at the frontier of magical research: Cumbersaad, a gnome from far away Telmari, found the vital link between a person’s brain and their magical ability; Fellami the Poet, discoverer of the principles that allowed for the enchantment of mundane objects; Ripotum and Oedilum, the dwarven brothers whose research laid the foundation for modern runework. These and eleven others were honored by having the months on the calendar named after them by the elves. The orcs used a different calendar, so she had never heard of them, though she was forced to admit that the elven calendar, consisting of fifteen months that were four five-day weeks long, made more sense than the one she was used to.

  Of these fifteen, she was immediately drawn to Hetipa. Hetipa was the only orc of those honored scholars to sit on the calendar, and one of only four women. She lived in an age long before the orcs and elves fell out with one another and split the old continent of Goromun into the two modern continents of Nilriel and Astran, the mountains called Doddin’s Line separating them, which she assumed was what they named the Grakam Tooru, the Western Column.

  Hetipa was a figure of legend, and there were contradicting stories about who she was and what she did, though even the strictest scholars had to admit that she was doubtless an orc, an admission they covered briefly then proceeded to downplay in their biographies, much to her annoyance. Many discoveries were attributed to her, though those most widely accepted by scholars like Osotki and Newman included her expansion of potion theory, exploring the vast realms of the ethereal, and discovering how to slay dragons, once thought to be immortal. For that, she was known as Hetipa the Dragonslayer, though records suggest she never slew a dragon herself. Compared to that, Mergau the Elfslayer sounded rather pathetic.

  “I believe I have a tome that might help with your scrying issue,” said Ezma before Mergau could become too engrossed in her books. She reached into the other room and produced a coverless volume, the papers bound together with twine and yellowed with age. She handed it unceremoniously to Mergau, who read the title and felt like she was being mocked.

  “The Basics of Self-Grooming by Xenodej?” she said, angrily gripping the crinkled paper and feeling it tear under her powerful fingers. “So you’re saying the only way to help me is by reading hygiene tips written by an insane scholar?”

  “Insane he may have been, but he was also devilishly clever, clever enough to be one of the fifteen. His research into the process of focusing power is unparalleled even ten thousand years later.”

  “He also married his cat and skinned his sister, wearing her like a coat on formal occasions.”

  Ezma shrugged. “Nobody is perfect.”

  A dismissive answer. Mergau knew that meant ‘shut up and get to work,’ so she did.

  The scribes who copied Xenodej’s work had to do something that was unnecessary with other ancient pieces: every line was copied precisely, from the curves on the loops of his Ls to the scratchy lines used on the doodles of his cat-wife in the margins. This was due to all the hidden messages and codes Xenodej was fond of using. Mergau had read in a biography of the fifteen that one of his most famous books seemed to jump erratically from subject to subject, making it impossible to follow. It was only after careful examination that it was discovered the pictures in the book were actually drawn using the words and
numbers of the missing paragraphs written in lines so fine and closely bundled they appear solid without a magnifying glass. Magnifying glasses did not exist when he wrote the book, so no one is sure how he managed the feat. Regardless, it took a decade of examining the originals to decode the lines and determine their order, but the result was eventually published in the version known today.

  The book in Mergau’s hands was probably not one of the originals, seeing as Xenodej lived far too long ago for the paper to have survived without magical protections and this copy was distinctly mundane. Still, it was quite old by any measure and seemingly useless. It looked to be about neither magic nor self-grooming, seeming more a rambling journal focused instead on the events in his garden and the mold growing on his countertops. If there was some hidden message in the work, Mergau wasn’t seeing it. She made it through the first twenty pages before she ran out of patience and put the book aside in disgust.

  “Giving up already?” said Ezma, tsking.

  “I’m don’t understand this book, mistress. If It’s supposed to be helpful, I don’t see how. I’ll come back fresh after I’ve had some time with another book.”

  “Except those books don’t have the information you need. Go back to Xenodej’s book and try again.”

  Mergau could feel her annoyance bubbling. “If there is some cipher here that you can explain to me, mistress, then I will get right back to it.”

  “And rob you of the experience?”

  “I don’t remember code-breaking being a part of my training.”

  “Back to Xenedej, child. And the bleeding has stopped, so you’d best change out of that diaper.”

  Mergau blushed furiously and bit back her reply. Of course Ezma knew she was wearing it. It was foolish to think she didn’t. But Ezma always seemed to know exactly what results her training would bring, so Mergau figured it would be best if she listened, both in regard to the book and the soiled cloth. She had to remind herself of that to make her hands close her book, peel the fabric off of herself, toss it near the wall, and pick Xenodej’s grooming guide back up.