“Geez, kid, you’ve got an aura about you now. I never would’ve believed this place would ever heal and next thing I know, the mountains are crumbling, the sky is clearing and rain! People who have lived here all of their lives have never once seen honest-to-gods rain! Mot passed through here and told the council to revere you as Pierait Wellbourne, savior of the Barren Lands. They’re talking of calling this the Wellspring Valley and colonizing the place again.”
“I wonder if this means that the threat in the north is gone too…” Pierait thought out loud. He was recalling that there was that pocket in the north, another mountain caldera that was becoming a home for wraiths that had almost taken the Reishefolk man Finn to his death.
“Hey, your eyes are different too, kid. They used to look… flat, empty. You have actual pupils and irises now. Still got that Felis reflective quality, but it makes you look warmer, ya know?”
“How long have I been gone?”
“Not long at all, kid; five days or so,” Iric said shrugging. It was no wonder he was so hungry! He had left during the
day, found the Wellspring at night, but he had been unconscious after that. He had woken at night again so he didn’t think much of it. To him, it seemed like he was returning the next day but he hadn’t been sure.
“So the sky has been clear for 5 days?” Pierait asked. “Yes, but it never rained until today!” Iric told him, looking up at the sky and letting the rain hit his face. “Ah, but that poor friend of yours, Lyria…”
Pierait started to panic. “W-what about her?” Pierait frantically asked, grabbing Iric’s collar.
“Calm down, kid, she’s okay, she’s just been down. She thought that all the changes meant that you had sacrificed yourself in the end or something noble and sad.”
It touched his heart that Lyria had cared for him so much.
“I’m going to see her, Iric. Thank you for filling me in, but I need to see her now,” Pierait said and started running off for the hotel before he had even finished, shouting the rest back to him.
Pierait had run past the desk, fumbling in his pocket for the keycard, as he went. The sun was barely lighting the sky at this point so she ought to be sleeping still, but he would wake her if need be; he didn’t think she would mind. The wait up to the right floor seemed excruciating and he would’ve taken the stairs just to keep moving if it wouldn’t have taken so much longer and expended so much energy just to do it.
When he got to the door, he opened it quietly and peeked in to see that she was sleeping on the bed, a pretty mint-green silky night slip riding up on her hips, exposing the little matching panties underneath. He watched her sleeping there, sprawled on her back with her arms above her head on her long tangled coppery brown hair. Her legs were together and the apex of the triangle marking her sex drew his eyes and he scanned his view up her body to resting on her barely rising and falling breasts.
He wasn’t sure how she would react but he removed the belt and any buckles, only leaving on his softer clothes and lowered himself next to her. He left his legs alongside hers but propped himself up on his elbows on either side of her waist and brought his lips softly to her forehead, hoping that skin contact would no longer cause her pain, afraid that his thoughts might be open to her now and repelling her in a different way.
She softly stirred and must have realized she wasn’t alone because her eyes shot open fearfully, and then she looked at him with disbelief.
“Pierait?” she whispered, her hands shooting up to touch his face. She squished his cheeks in that way that makes someone get fish-face and he laughed softly, catching her wrists and gently pinning them above her head again. Her rapid breaths at the initial fear were making her breasts rise and fall, the nipples taut with the cloth rubbing them to attention.
He pushed her hands together so that one of his hands held both and lowered the other hand to the slope of her ribcage and caressed that curve with the backs of his fingers.
Lyria’s breath caught with a hitch and she freed her hands to put them on his face again, this time just stroking his cheeks.
“Your eyes are so alive now… Is it really you? It still feels like a dream. I thought you were gone,” Lyria said, her voice both sad and awed.
Pierait brought his hand to that apex of cloth and softly stroked at the bud underneath and Lyria’s hips jolted and she grabbed Pierait’s collar. Her eyes widened and Pierait laughed.
“Does it still feel like a dream?” he asked, with hooded eyes.
“Absolutely, but I know I’m awake,” Lyria countered. “Pierait, I… I’ve never done this sort of thing before. Urys was pretty protective and…”
Pierait put a finger to her lips and jumped up off the bed, taking her hand and pulling her to her feet too. He just stood by the bed and stroked her wild hair, touching her with his fingertips and watching her react with mixed shyness and pleasure. He brought her fingers to the buttons on his short tunic-style robe and tilted her head up so she would meet his eyes.
“Undo my buttons,” Pierait softly ordered.
Lyria bit her lip and did her best to still her trembling fingers to do what he asked. When she was done, she hesitated then pushed the sides back and over his shoulders until it fell to the floor. She wasn’t quite sure how he managed it but his skin was tanned without lines and his small form was exquisitely muscled, his own nipples a slightly deeper color than his skin. She touched his chest and drew her finger over the muscles, watching them ripple and jump as she touched them. When she touched his nipple, she heard him suck in air and her eyes shot to his to see that his eyes were nearly slits and a darker gold color—he was enjoying this.
Lyria moved her hands around his waist and when they came back around, she held the little dagger he kept at his hip to his throat. Pierait frowned and tilted his head in confusion.
“Who are you really? Are you using illusion to deceive me?” Lyria hissed at him. Pierait started to move his hands but Lyria pressed the blade closer. “Don’t move!”
“Lyria, it’s Pierait, I swear it. Why are you confused?” he asked her gently, his eyes returning to a more natural gold color.
“I can’t hear your thoughts. I can’t hear anything. I could hear the Void even as it drained me, and I can hear humans, undead, and so much more, but I’ve never heard nothing, so what are you then?” Lyria asked unhappily.
Pierait’s eyes lit up in realization and he smiled.
“I guess I should have explained some things first but there’s a lot about having… a soul that I hadn’t bargained for; lust, anger, uncertainty, things such as I have never felt them so completely. Lyria, I was given another name once I found the Wellspring, when I sealed it from the human world, I healed the Barren Lands and I became a sort of channel of All-Souls. Am I going too fast?” Pierait asked her now.
Lyria looked dumbfounded as she lowered the knife shakily.
“By the gods, Pierait, you didn’t just get one but all unused souls flowing through you? All-Souls was in storybooks I read as a child, but I thought it was just myth. You were given the name Wellbourne?”
Pierait nodded, but he backed away slowly and sat, seeing that Lyria was still not comforted by that. He raised his hand up and let the light of the souls flow into his hand and swirl at his palm. As he looked at his palm, he spoke softly.
“No more Soulless, no more Furies, no more restless wraiths. The dead in limbo are at peace and Purposes are no longer. I remembered what my friend Rienna had said; I kept it with me. She had thought that one without a soul could touch the spring unharmed because it only drew souls in…” Pierait laughed shortly at that. “It wasn’t at all painless, but she was right. It was the death elemental Mot that told me what had changed. I was the only one that could do it in all of time, the only loophole that even the gods could not figure out, and my crazy mother turned out to be the unknown mastermind. A thing done in selfish love of her son that turned out to be the boon of us all.”
“Lyria, when
the ground shook, it was not a good thing. Mot told me that one of the old gods opened an eye to cause the destruction, something so simple as opening an eye so you can imagine what happens if they wake entirely before the Dream. The things that Myceum does, the measures it may take to stop them, may wake the old gods prematurely. It’s possible that this is exactly what they are after. They simply have to cause enough fear to drive us to stir the old gods and it is all over.”
“What good would it do Myceum to destroy everything? Everything would mean them as well!” Lyria countered.
“My Uncle Atram once told me that a madman will attempt to do a thing simply because it hasn’t been done before. In his head, he is making a history that will never be written. To do what will be undone…”
Lyria’s face looked pained as she sat on the bed. She grabbed her robe from the bedpost and put it on now. Pierait closed his hand to stop the glowing flow there and watched Lyria sorting all of that out in her head.
“Why didn’t Mot tell me this?” Lyria asked aloud.
Now Pierait was confused. “Why would he?”
“I was confused too. Days ago he came to me and… granted me his aid. He explained that death was not a final ending but a change. I didn’t understand it because I am not governed by elementals, being descended from the old gods. He explained that he was manifest when Life became its own entity, that they do not exist without the other. They are as old as the old gods, Life and Death, but lay dormant. They only grant their gifts to one; there are no lesser elementals of Life and Death. Mot thinks they are the key to the Dream but not foolproof.”
This made sense to Pierait; he remembered Finn had received Life, the other wild card elemental and he hadn’t had the ability to wonder then about what Finn’s actual element had been—it would not have been one of the most powerful to come to his aid and had Fate had something else in mind, Finn never would have been led to them at all. Pierait was questioning his views about Fate more often since his own change. He had been a wild card and hadn’t known it and so much else was happening that was now changing the cards in the deck. It wasn’t a clean-cut deck of 52; some were going missing, only to be replaced with twice as many, some whole, some torn. Maybe it still made sense to the old gods in some way but Pierait wasn’t wholly convinced that destiny or fate was even in play at all. Sometimes choices were limited but then sometimes our vision of where we can go is what limits us. Sometimes we are convinced that all is left and right and forget that we can dig down or look up and find a rope we can jump for. Sometimes we have to make our own choices; we’re not always just bitch to something-higher’s plans.
The more Pierait thought about it, the more it made sense why elementals chose humans to carry their powers. The old gods knew what their children were up to, but not quite what their children’s children were doing. However, the elementals also knew that as well as the old gods could handle them, they had about as much control over humans; which, in all reality, was next to none. The old gods could move the elementals with fear, much as the elementals could do the same with humans. However, the old gods were like grandparents to the humans in a sense as well—neither of them were overly fond of the elementals and wished they could do away with them, but it wasn’t that easy. The world was held together by the elementals, like it or not, and until they could be separated from their power, they were protected from destruction. The enmity between the elementals and the old gods was clear, but Pierait wondered if the elementals knew that his friends were essentially plotting their destruction and most likely even with the powers that they had given them. Krose especially was openly hateful of his powers from Lumina. More often than not, the petty fights the elementals seemed fond of ended up causing a lot of trouble for everyone else.
Pierait must have spent a lot of time thinking through all of this and had been startled when he realized Lyria was crouching in front of him, dressed like a battle Valkyrie of death. She smiled and took his hand in hers.
“Pierait, we should look for your friends—when the time comes, we should all be together. However this ends, it feels like we should at least do that much.”
It had been weeks since Pierait had left his friends, a month at the least; time wasn’t something he was entirely sure of. His friends had decided to march on Myceum in no more than two weeks, so they would have begun weeks ago. He wondered if they fought still or if they even lived or defeated their foes. He thought they must have begun their march at least, but he did not think anything final had been reached. If they fought still, Lyria was right and they had to hurry to Myceum.
Chapter 10: Fear the Reaper
Melchior heard the shouts go up from where he was walking through the practice yard, but wasn’t quite sure what was causing the chaos. Over the past week, he had been used to a strict routine that rarely involved sleep or sex and it was making him cranky and less alert. The old magician, Ghyliad, was slipping away again—his extended week of time was up. Melchior was also in no great mood to learn that his companions had broken off on their own agendas when his own impatience had left them restless (and that rumors were floating around about Rienna being his first crush—he couldn’t wait to find out which one of them started that fire). He wanted to be angry with them but knew it was his own damn fault. If he had been utilizing them better, it would have made his work easier. He was used to taking everything upon himself and now he was learning a valuable lesson in why that was a stupid way of doing things.
As Melchior hurried towards the east gate where the commotion was, he could see Dinsch screaming as a dying Krose was cradled in his arms, pale, gasping, sweating and coughing up blood. Melchior accelerated in a blaze of fire to meet them, snatching Krose from Dinsch to lay him flat and proceeded to administer whatever first aid he could muster from his years as a soldier. There was no using his powers to cauterize this wound and where Melchior had let it go that they had all left before, he was equal parts pissed and worried that the ones who could help Krose weren’t here and he was down to his own impotent methods of help. From all the blood on Dinsch and still weakly oozing from Krose, he was surprised the young thief was still alive. He wouldn’t be soon and there wasn’t shit he could do about it.
“How the hell did he get hurt through his armor?” Melchior asked Dinsch to keep his focus while he worked.
“It was a Felisfolk, one with a minor elemental at that. A spy for Myceum that we had tracked and killed, but not before she got the jump on us,” Dinsch explained his voice high with worry. It was mostly true, only they had been much more foolish than that.
Melchior could see this was a losing battle; even though he had been able to drain the lungs and keep Krose from drowning in his blood, he had lost far too much of it. His heart was slowing and Krose’s skin was grayish. Krose was smiling weakly at Melchior, knowing he wasn’t making it. Dinsch had stooped down to hold Krose’s hand and Krose was too weak to squeeze it.
Shadows passed them overhead but they were too numbed to notice. The soldiers that had gathered about were shouting something and clearing out of the way but Melchior and Dinsch were dazed with the impending death.
Melchior had felt a hand on his shoulder and started to shake it off but his brother’s face came into view, smiling that damned cherubic grin.
“Ashe?” he asked in disbelief.
“Back away, Melchior, but you’re going to want to see this,” Ashe told him gently.
Melchior was able to focus as he saw Rienna dismounting from a huge winged unicorn. The creature walked forward and Melchior had noticed that Ashe and several other soldiers were having a hard time restraining Dinsch as he screamed over the unmoving, seemingly lifeless body of his friend. The unicorn and Rienna worked together, Rienna removing the tubing and the unicorn glowing light blue as it knelt and plunged its horn directly through Krose’s armor into the crushed cavity of his ribcage.
The unicorn rose, horn unbloodied, a trail of the blue light from the hole to the horn. Krose’s eyes
shot open as his torso bucked up off of the ground and he sucked in a loud raspy gasp of air, like a babe taking its first breath of life. His color returned and his caved-in ribs started to mend. The hole in his armor sealed itself and Krose’s hands started to feel over the wounded spot, wonder in his eyes. The magic faded and Ashe and the others let Dinsch go.
Dinsch started to go at full speed but had stopped just before crashing into him and suddenly seemed reluctant to touch his friend. Krose met Dinsch’s eyes and did the work for him, reaching up and bringing Dinsch into a crushing hug. They were both covered in Krose’s sticky, drying blood and once the shock had left, they started laughing and crying. Melchior was frowning stoically but there was relief in his eyes while Ashe and Rienna could not help but cry as well as Dinsch picked up Krose and started to spin him around. The other soldiers were mesmerized, either focusing on the miracle and joy around them or shooting looks at the amazing creatures that had come to cause it.
Ashe had turned Melchior to face him and had to inspect his brother’s spacey expression before Melchior would focus on him.
“Damn, brother, you look like hell. Rienna!” Ashe shouted, and Rienna turned her attention to them and hurried over.
“Would you help him get cleaned up? He’s been working too hard. Doesn’t water have some kind of sleeping power?” Ashe asked and Rienna nodded.
“If I hadn’t used it, we never would’ve gotten any sleep the other night,” Rienna said matter-of-factly. Ashe laughed but Rienna shrugged.
Rienna linked her arm in Melchior’s and led him off towards the sleeping quarters in the barracks.
“You’ve been taking on too much by yourself,” Rienna told him as they walked through the stone hallways.
“You’ve been taking on my brother. I was starting to think you two would never go through with it. Don’t bother making me sleep, there’s no time for that,” Melchior countered and Rienna winced, thinking that Melchior hadn’t caught her meaning in his stupor. She should have known better; Melchior seemed to have a keen sense of deciphering double entendre.
The Truth about Heroes: Complete Trilogy (Heroes Trilogy) Page 43
