by Licia Troisi
Nihal collapsed to her knees, and for the first time in her life she dropped her sword before an enemy.
Aster gave a triumphant smile and stepped toward her. The bottom of the sun dipped under the horizon. “As with Sennar, your last hope, too, is death, Nihal. You no longer have an aim in life. Only two choices remain: join me and help me to bring my great task to its rightful conclusion, or die, here and now. For those like you and me, there is no peace on earth, only the quiet, stillness of death.”
The rays of the falling sun turned a deep red. The day was coming to a close and Aster had won.
He would carry out his plan. He would wipe every last being from the face of the earth, and in the end, he too would plunge into nonexistence.
Nihal lay on the ground, unable to move, her sword inches from her fingers.
Aster arrived at her motionless body and began crouching down to her, but just then, he doubled over, his face curled in a grimace of agony.
“Maybe you’re right, maybe death is my only hope for peace. But at least you’ll beat me to the grave,” Nihal hissed through gritted teeth.
In a fit of despair, she’d gripped her sword and thrust the blade through the belly of her archnemesis. She watched as the child’s eyes widened with pain and his mouth fell open, speechless. And in the very depths of his gaze, what she saw, in truth, was joy. Deep down, death was all that Aster had ever truly desired.
Nihal withdrew the blade and the Tyrant slumped to the earth. In the course of an instant, the child’s body regained its years and morphed into an old and withered corpse. That too, disappeared, and Aster turned to dust.
Vengeance had run its course. For so long, Nihal had waited for this moment, had dreamed of it down to the very last detail, and she’d always believed her joy would be uncontainable, infinitely immense. But what she tasted now was only bitterness.
She’d killed Aster, but she hadn’t altered the past. The dead still lay in the earth, Sennar among them. All that Nihal had done, she’d done in his name or thanks to his help. Now her battle had lost all meaning, and so had her life.
Alone in the room, as the walls around her began to quake and crumble, Nihal couldn’t wrap her mind around the image of Sennar lifeless, his body stretched on the cold floor of a dungeon cell far beneath the palace. Death and Sennar seemed two completely unrelated concepts, just as life and Sennar seemed inseparable. What could she do now?
Nihal lay there, frozen on the earth. So what if the Fortress collapsed around her? She wanted nothing but to stay right where she was, on the ground, forever. In one sense, Aster had been right. For her, there was no peace, no hope for redemption. She felt sorry for Ido, for Soana, for everyone who’d ever cared for her, but her will to live was gone, if she’d ever had it.
She could hardly breathe. Nearly all eight stones had turned black. The Overworld was saved and she was doomed.
The dagger Sennar had given her was still tucked in her boot. With tears in her eyes, Nihal pulled it out and gripped it in her hands. To see the blade at last unlit would at least help her to accept reality. She unsheathed it.
The moment she glanced at the weapon, her heart stuttered. It was glowing. A faint, dying light, but the blade was lit. In his last, desperate attempt to fool her, the Tyrant had lied. Sennar was alive!
Nihal allowed herself no time to celebrate. There wasn’t a moment to lose. The Fortress was caving in, and if she wanted to save Sennar, she had to hurry. She sprang to her feet, nearly fainting from the effort. She could no longer feel her legs. Through the large window behind the throne, she could see the sun sinking relentlessly. She rallied her courage and followed the faint light of the dagger.
She began to run, the earth crumbling beneath her feet, the stairs folding in on themselves. The Fortress, stripped of its soul, was falling to pieces. Nihal sprinted through the dying palace, the walls flaking at her touch and covering her hands in black dust. One by one, the columns gave way, sending great hunks of ceiling to the earth.
I’m going to save him. I’m going to save him and we’re going to be happy, just like we deserve.
Short of breath, she went on running, her legs growing weaker with every step, the pain in her chest tightening into an unbearable anguish. She passed through the laboratories, the library. In the labyrinth of rooms where before she’d nearly lost her way, heaps of rubble littered the floor. Among the hulking stones were several bodies, friends and enemies, the pavement slick with their blood. Nihal struggled to stay on her feet.
I’m getting closer! I’m getting closer!
She burst through the doorway and into the battle ring and, lifting her eyes, saw the central tower teetering menacingly. Getting her bearings, Nihal dashed toward the prisons she’d seen from above. She rushed down a steep stairway and through a series of dark and damp hallways, the floor crumbling in her wake. She sped through narrow tunnels echoing with moans and tormented cries. Nihal felt the urge to free each and every prisoner, but her waning strength would not allow it. The road seemed infinite, the savage cries and inhuman groans multiplying around her. The dark grew ever more impenetrable, and Sennar’s cell seemed forever out of reach.
At last, she arrived before a door that she knew was his. Summoning every last ounce of strength, she shouldered through the entrance and crashed forward into the cell.
On the room’s back wall, hanging by his arms, was a man, his clothes tattered and stained with blood, his body riddled with lesions and lacerations. Nihal crawled toward him, trembling at the sight of his weakness.
“Sennar, Sennar …” she called through her tears, but the sorcerer said nothing. “Sennar, please … we have to get out of here. …”
She reached out and ran her hand along his cheek. Slowly, he lifted his head, and Nihal saw that his face, too, was marked with cuts and bruises. But his eyes were still his, still bright and blue, still the eyes she loved.
Sennar smiled weakly and parted his lips to speak her name. Using the wall as leverage, Nihal managed to pull herself up, while the world around her quaked and fell to pieces. She grasped for her sword, so she could break the chains holding Sennar to the wall, but found only an empty sheath hanging at her hip. She’d forgotten her sword in the throne room, where she’d slain the Tyrant. In her rush to find Sennar, she’d left it behind.
Scanning the room, she found only a stone that Sennar must have used as a makeshift seat. She hoisted it in the air and thrust it down on the chains with all her strength. They shattered beneath its weight. Sennar collapsed to the floor, and just then the cell walls began to give way. Nihal lifted the sorcerer, wrapping an arm under his neck, and began the climb back out of the dungeon.
Straining with all her might, she hauled him up the stairs, surging forward toward the exit with each step. She would never give up on her dream, or the future she’d rightfully earned.
She fell. Rose to her feet again. Pushed onward, her body growing weaker and weaker. At last, reaching the top of the stairs, at the entrance to the battle ring, she collapsed to the floor and felt she would never get up again. The sun must have sunk below the horizon, for the world around her glowed with a fire-red light. Nihal had nothing left in her. The sword with which she might have smashed the talisman and regained her strength was lost in the depths of the palace. It was her fate to die in that ring, never to taste the fruit of her labors.
If only there were a way to save Sennar. He could live for the both of us. …
It was then that Nihal remembered Reis’s words and the power of the talisman. She could still invoke another spell. It would mean her death, but it would save Sennar. No hope remained for her. The moment the sun set, she would be dead.
I can’t save the entire world, but I can save a single life.
Nihal was afraid to die when she’d finally learned to live. But that was her fate. She recited the Flying Spell, and as she gave herself bod
y and soul to the force of the magic, as she felt her life flee from her limbs, the black wings on her back spread open to the wind.
Epilogue
The day the Tyrant invaded my mind, I finally understood the meaning of true hopelessness. There had been times before then when I thought I’d lost all hope—when I pulled Nihal, barely alive, from the mud in Salazar; lying on the floor in my cell in Zalenia; when I think back to the atrocity I committed in the Land of Night, pulverizing the enemy. But only in that moment when the Tyrant broke through my defenses and crept into my soul did I truly know desperation. As he scoured my mind for the truth that his men were unable to get out of me with torture, I too, for a brief instant, saw into his soul, and I felt his emotions as my own. And what I felt then was the utter totality of his hopelessness.
He’d long since ceased believing. Everything he’d ever trusted had crumbled in his hands, and all that remained were pain and emptiness. And until I saw it for myself, I never understood. Until then, I could never grasp how any living being could dream of such destruction. I’d always felt that the longing for death, even in the case of suicide, was the result of clinging too desperately to life. The Tyrant yearned for nothingness, for himself and for the world, because he was tormented by his own vile state and the state of every creature in the Overworld. He stood convinced that the only hope left for these lands of ruin and misery was annihilation.
When I found out he’d been killed, even though I knew it was the only way to put a stop to him, I felt a sadness deep inside, because in the end he, too, was a victim, just like the rest of us.
They told me how, when Nihal killed Aster, the earth began to quake and the Fortress came crumbling down. I’d been completely unconscious then, languishing on the floor of my cell, an inch from death, but all those who survived the battle knew in that moment that forty years of destruction and devastation had come to an end. Raising their swords to the sky, they cried out in victory. And their joyous shout spread from land to land, from the Saar to the desert, rising up from the lungs of those who, before then, had known only slavery. It was all over, and a new epoch unfurled before them.
Amid the ruined Fortress, long after sunset, the battle raged on, and the new era was ushered in by bloodshed. Many of the Tyrant’s men surrendered; others went on fighting, though whether they stayed or fled, not a single one was spared. The men who were “fighting for peace,” as Nihal had said to the Tyrant, rained down on the defeated enemy with unbridled cruelty, emboldened beyond all mercy by their victory. They battled well into the night, until peace settled like a fog over the earth.
The next morning, a pale sun rose over the blood-soaked and rubble-strewn battlefield. Only shards of black crystal and the corpses of the Tyrant’s followers remained as reminders of the great kingdom the Tyrant had labored so long to create. But it wasn’t only the blood of his soldiers that stained the earth. Thousands of our troops had perished in the battle. Raven’s body was found at the Fortress’s battered gates. Despite his arrogance, he’d fought with great heart. His death was mourned by many.
On Ido, however, fate smiled more kindly—though to be fair it was Vesa, more than fate, that kept him alive. When the dwarf collapsed, senseless, to the earth, the battle was still raging all around him. Seeking to avenge Deinforo, who lay lifeless at his side, one enemy after another came rushing at the dwarf. Vesa swooped down over his master, spreading his wings to protect him from the enemy soldiers. He chewed them up, he burned them to ashes, he did everything in his power to fend them off. And so Ido survived. Of course, he came out with more than a scratch or two and in need of extensive medical care. But after a month and a half, he was back with his sword in hand, marked with a few more scars but ready as ever to do his part in helping to build the coming era.
The aid of the Underworld’s troops proved essential to the effort, and Varen distinguished himself on the battlefield. Many of his men fell right before his eyes, and still he went on fighting to the bitter end, when an enemy lance pierced through his lightweight armor. The count, however, had fortune on his side, and escaped that fateful day with his life, though he suffered a grave wound to his shoulder.
The highest death toll came in the territories ruled by the Tyrant. The majority of the rebels were slaughtered. Of the three-thousand-man army Aires had managed to assemble, only thirty came out alive. She herself was found beneath a heap of corpses, still breathing. For long, she mourned the death of her men, though she knew that without blood and sacrifice, there was no victory, and that their lives had not been lost in vain.
As for me, I was found all but dead at the foot of the Fortress. It wasn’t bodily wounds that endangered my life, but wounds to the spirit. What the Tyrant did to me left me broken, my mind in fragments, my will to fight completely sapped. Those who cared for me in the battle’s aftermath saved me from the grasp of death. Slowly, I resurfaced. When I woke from my endless sleep, my mind was as blank as a newborn’s and many took me for a madman. I had to learn to live again, to readapt my mind to the world around me. Gradually, the memory of who I had once been returned to me, and I was reborn.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t salvage my leg. It’s still there, where it always was, though I’ve lost use of it, and drag it along, lifeless, behind me. Regardless, I’ve gotten used to it by now, and the walking staff makes me look wiser and more like a war hero. With my beard grown out the way it is now, I even resemble one of the Council sages that Aster and I always imagined as kids. Of course, what helped me get through all this was the one thing Aster never had, the one thing he’d always longed for: love.
When they found me by the Fortress, Nihal was there next to me. The talisman was still hanging from her neck, the stones completely black. She’d stopped breathing.
For several days, they thought her dead. They brought her to the Academy’s weapons room and laid her out in her armor, the white symbol gleaming on her chest, her sword at her side once they recovered it from the ruins of Aster’s throne room. She was decorated with the highest honors, for it was she who’d killed the Tyrant, she to whom the Overworld owed its existence. Oarf curled up at her side. He’d waited for her in the ring throughout the entire battle and had fought bravely against the enemy. He remembered Nihal’s promise, that when it was all over, she’d come back for him, that they’d never part again, and he’d come to make good on that promise, in her honor. Lying there, it seemed as if he’d never budge, as if he’d stay there for all eternity to watch over his knight.
The funeral pyre—a rite owed to every fallen knight—was set for later that week, but the date was pushed back. Something strange and unexpected had given them cause for doubt. Nihal’s body showed no sign of decay, her flesh rosy and firm, as if she were still alive.
“Please, hold off a little longer,” a tearful Soana pleaded with Nelgar, who was pushing for the funeral rites to be carried out as soon as possible. “I don’t know how to explain, but I can feel it, her story on this earth hasn’t ended yet.”
Although everyone present gazed at her with pity, her request was approved.
It happened as the sun set over Makrat. Her room was empty but for the two guards watching over her deposed body, and the tiny creature came flitting in inconspicuously. Watching as it made its way to Nihal, the guards assumed it had come, like many others, to pay tribute to the heroine.
The miniscule being walked up to Nihal’s face and climbed on her chin, turning its mournful eyes to the half-elf. “Is that it, Nihal?” he asked quietly. “You’re done? You’ve given up on your dream, with Sennar lying only a few rooms away? He’s still fighting, still waiting for you. Don’t you think you should go to him?” He smiled. “You suffered down to the very core of your being. You gave everything in you for the one person you could save. In the end, you found the Ultimate Aim. The new world you always spoke of is finally upon us, and you’re meant to live in it.”
Phos ran a hand
down her cheek, just as he had the last time they’d seen each other.
“The Forest Father awaits his heart. If I take this stone from where it is set in your armor and bring it to him, he will live again. But what sense is there, now, in his being alive? Who would benefit from his existence? So many in this world need you—Sennar above all, and there’s still much for you to do. Meanwhile, my dead Forest Father, my home, my refuge, my sole friend, has already done his duty. All around him now is only charred earth, dead trees, and desolation. His Forest, the Forest he nourished, is dead. As I told you, the Forest Father and I are relics of the old world, and for those of us who’ve lived so many years, it is our fate to step aside.” He went silent again, as if searching for the right words. “The Forest Father has decided. He has chosen to be your father, to grant you his vital sap, so that you can go on living and do your duty. It will not be easy. The gift of life is one of the most beautiful and terrifying gifts one can receive, an honor and a burden at once. But the Forest Father and I know that you are worthy of this gift.” Phos stretched his miniscule hands toward Mawas, the stone of the Land of the Wind, and recited an incomprehensible spell. A vivid light filled the stone, its energy flowing to the others in the amulet. They, too, glowed again, not with the same radiance as on the day Nihal had enacted the enchantment, but with a calm and soothing glow. And as light returned to the stones, so too did the color to Nihal’s cheeks, and her soul sparked with life anew.
“And so, the Father dies and the Daughter is born. As long as you wear this talisman around your neck, you will live. To lose it will mean your death.” Phos leaned his weight on Nihal’s arms, as if exhausted. “All that remains now is for you to live your dream and claim the prize you’ve earned. Use wisely this gift from my Old Tree and me.”
As silently as he’d come, Phos departed, never to be seen again.
