Light the Reign (The Forgotten: Book 3)

by Cole, Laura R

  She reached a fat little hand up onto the cart and grabbed a handful of flowers. Then, with a gracefulness and elegance far beyond her years, she pulled just one flower out of the bouquet for each grave, and set it somberly on it. When she had gotten to the last one, others started coming forward, pulling the flowers off the cart, and putting them onto the graves.

  Layna went and picked Phoenix up, giving her a proud kiss, and she and Gryffon quietly removed themselves from the proceedings. The people should now grieve in their own way, without the Gelendan monarchs in their way.

  The guards had once again read her mind, and already had their horses unhitched from the cart, ready to bear them away. She handed Phoenix to one of them while she mounted, reaching down to sweep the baby back into her arms once she was seated. Phoenix cuddled into her, falling almost immediately asleep, and they rode off without fanfare. Layna glanced back over her shoulder and saw that there were many people before the graves, hugging one another and crying. The crying was both happy and sad. A mixture of loss for those who hadn’t survived the curse, and relief for those who had.

  A few stragglers followed them off, but most stayed at the cemetery, sensing that the excitement was over. Layna certainly hoped so. That was about as much excitement as she could take for one day.

  But the day wasn’t over yet. When they had ridden a fair distance away, they transported back to the edge of the dome in Gelendan. They postulated that enough of the people had already been exposed to the cure that it would be safe enough to take it down. Plus, the relief that it would cause seeing it removed would be worth it, and hopefully help to draw out the last of the people holed up in hiding. Though it used the Dragonstone which was with Katya, they had keyed it so that they could end the spell without physically having the stone, so she and Gryffon linked hands. Delving into the power, they slowly removed the containment field, letting the magic reabsorb into the land around them.

  Once it was gone, its opalescent shimmer sparkling out of existence, they moved their parade forward towards Naoham. People started appearing out of the trees, pointing both up to the sky and at them. Closer to the city, the crowd began to swarm in around their parade, and shouts rang out.

  “It’s Phoenix!”

  “She’s cured us!”

  Obviously, the initial escapades into the city to spread the cure had succeeded in also spreading the news that it was Phoenix’s sacrifice that had allowed it to happen. Soon, they had an even greater following than they had accumulated in Treymayne. Moving through the narrow city streets was difficult as more and more came out to see their passage, and they crept along through the swarm. Not many were in need of healing, which was good to see, though a few did come forward to be healed miraculously at Phoenix’s touch.

  As they entered the royal grounds – where the public was stopped at the gates, shouting Phoenix’s name – Layna let out a sigh of relief.

  “It looks like the worst of it has been taken care of,” Gryffon’s voice sounded right next to her, and she looked up to see that he had pulled his horse in close to hers. Axe was a trained battle-horse, and had ridden with Fly, Layna’s mount, many times, so they had no problem matching their gait so that it was almost as if the two riders were sitting together.

  Layna looked from Phoenix to Gryffon with love. She smiled at her husband.

  “Let’s go home.”

  *

  Katya brushed a fleck of dirt off the mirror and waited for Layna’s face to appear. When it did, the woman was smiling brightly. Apparently their journey into Treymayne had gone well. Her smile faltered when Katya failed to return it.

  “The Dena’ina leader was correct,” she stated morosely.

  Katya nodded. “Unfortunately so. There are hundreds of bloodbeasts that have been released into the world once more. Much worse than anything we’ve seen in our lifetime.” She paused and glanced behind her where the tribal leaders were huddled with their heads together, but out of range of hearing her conversation. “Their prophecy said that the portal would only be opened when the world was ready to be rid of them once and for all, but because Kali convinced them that it was actually her that orchestrated events, and not the prophecy, they are worried that we won’t be able to defeat them.”

  “Do you think we won’t be able to?” Layna’s face grew more worried.

  Katya shook her head quickly. “No, I don’t. I don’t think with all we’ve been through so far, that this will be our undoing. But it has shattered their confidence.”

  “Are you able to prepare a gate on your side?” Layna asked, further clarifying though Katya knew what she meant, “can you tame the wild magic long enough to make it steady in that area?”

  “Yes,” she answered, “we’ve been getting the technique for cleansing an area down pretty well, many places we’ve left are still holding, even without constant maintenance. We should be able to hold a gate with no problem.”

  “Really,” Layna looked thoughtful. “I wonder if we could then make a more permanent gateway.” She stared off into space.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rather than just have it be anchor points for the person traveling and doing the spell, to open a constant portal that people could go through. If we are able to hold it open for any length of time, we could get a large number of people up there very quickly.”

  “To transport an army up to stop the beasts,” Katya was thoughtful now. She had been counting on the support of both Gelendan and Treymayne, knowing that the two were in talks to possibly merge. Though Treymayne had been the one to first suggest it, they had gotten cold feet when the Bricrui curse first appeared. Even so, Katya was sure that Layna could convince them to help. If they were able to actually get an army onto the Plains, before the beast horde had moved into populated areas, it was possible that they could contain the catastrophe before it even became one. “We have been planning an attack in an area which we hope will give us a strategic advantage. Just before the horde hits the edge of Gelendan, the Plains filter into a canyon as the landscape changes. If the beasts continue on their current course, they should all pass through this one section. We were hoping to be able to just sit on the rims of the canyon and pick as many of them off as we could.”

  “And if there was an army there to help you do it,” Layna sighed in relief, “this may not be as much of an issue as I feared.” She frowned. “Though I hate that it will mean more lives lost. There have been so many already.”

  Katya’s friend closed her eyes for a minute. The worry and regret made her look ten years older for a brief moment, but when she opened her eyes again, there was nothing in them but a fierce determination.

  “Thank you again, Katya, without you, we would not have even known that this threat existed.”

  “Nor would it exist if I hadn’t convinced all the tribes to give me their stones,” she pointed out.

  “But then the Bricrui would still have its claws in us.” She sighed again, this time resigned. “I feel as though we are back in the Dark King’s tomb; one booby-trap after another, luring you into a false sense of security before hitting you with the next one.”

  As Katya had not been with her when they had gone through the tomb, this reference didn’t have as much meaning to her, but she heard Gryffon chuckle slightly in the background.

  “Well, then it’s settled,” she said instead of commenting. “We’ll prepare the gate and get your army through. The bloodbeasts will never know what hit them.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Layna looked out across the battleground in frustration. Though the spot that Katya had picked was indeed the best strategically, people were still dying. She could feel it as their life forces were extinguished. Katya’s first estimates of just how many beasts there were in the horde had proved to have been made prematurely, as they continued to pour out of the portal seemingly without end.

  Something hit the shield surrounding her with a resounding thud, and she turned her attention back to the ba
ttle. Spying the small creature that had tried to get past her defenses, she took aim at the thing. It turned back to her and gave her a malicious grin. It was a tiny humanoid creature, with a long spiked tail and horns. Black scales ran the length of its body, stopping at its head, where it blended into the thick leathery skin of its face and dark spiny hair.

  She shot a bolt of electrical energy at it, she preferred fire, but had found that many of these beasts were resistant to it. Some were even perpetually on fire. Seeing the bolt coming towards it at blinding speed wiped the grin off the thing’s face, and it maneuvered to get out of the way.

  When it had moved so that the bolt’s path would take it by him harmlessly, he turned and smiled at her again. Layna smiled back, turning his expression to one of confusion, and at the very last second, she adjusted the energy’s direction, hitting the little beast square in the chest. He exploded into a fiery ball of flame, then extinguished.

  The bloodbeasts came in all shapes and sizes. Some Layna could determine what the beast was originally, but some were so contorted that she would never have been able to guess what it had been before the change. Some, like the little creature she had just dispatched, seemed to have almost human-like personalities, but others retained their animal thoughts, driven mad by constant pain. She couldn’t imagine having lived during the Dark King’s reign, having these beasts allowed in the world.

  She felt more of the army dying, and bit straight through her lip in frustration. There were too many! She glanced over at Gryffon and saw that he was holding his own. Not that she had needed to do so as their magic was combined and she could feel it, but the reassurance made her feel better anyway.

  All of a sudden, a great looming creature appeared in the distance from the direction of the portal. It must be something very large that had only recently come out of its prison. Layna squinted at it, trying to determine just what it was, but couldn’t make it out. She held off several creatures attacking her, while still peering into the distance at this new foe.

  As it drew closer, she sucked in her breath. If she didn’t know any better, she would swear that it was a dragon winging its way towards them. It pumped the air with great wings, wobbling slightly, and came closer and closer. Frantic shouting broke out among the troops as they caught sight of the massive beast, and arrows and spells were flung towards it. It was still out of range, overly excited as they were by its sudden appearance into the battle, and the missiles mostly missed their target.

  The dragon-beast roared its rage anyway, throwing its head back in a strange manner. Layna took out her sword, Leoht, and slashed at a beast that was climbing up over the lip of the canyon. It looked to be some sort of raccoon or other small rodent-like beast that had been horribly mangled and had overly-long claws which it used to scale the steep cliff.

  She saw an opening and lunged at it, spearing the creature through its heart, and it gurgled and twitched, dying before her as she retrieved her sword. She looked up again at the approaching dragon creature and scrunched her brow in confusion. There was something very disfigured about it. Not that it was unusual with these beasts, but this one seemed almost disjointed.

  It had reached the battleground now, and it made a roaring pass at those on Layna’s side of the canyon wall. It knocked several soldiers to their deaths below, and snapped another up in its great mouth. It whooshed past Layna with a sickening blast of putrid air, and she almost lost the contents of her stomach as she realized why it looked so odd.

  She had been trying to figure out how they had managed to turn a dragon – the most powerful creature Layna knew of – into a bloodbeast. Or perhaps had somehow made another creature simply grow to be that large and take on the shape of a dragon. But it turned out not to be either of those theories.

  Layna looked closely at the thing as it swept past, and saw, to her horror, that it wasn’t one large creature at all. The dragon was made up of dozens of smaller creatures – she thought she saw the shapes of bats in the wings, snakes on the tail, and many other animals she couldn’t immediately recognize. Its wingtip faltered a bit and just brushed against a bear-like creature below, which reared up and swiped at it with a massive paw. The two engaged in a bloody battle of their own for a few moments, before the bear ended up torn apart in the dragon’s teeth. Its jaw bore a striking resemblance to a creature Layna had read about that lived in the ocean: sharks. She couldn’t imagine how they would have come across one of those.

  The pain radiating off the dragon was much worse than the rest of the bloodbeasts. All of them had an aura of suffering; the pain they endured while being turned into what they were, combined with the spells made to keep them in a pain-induced rage. But whether it was just because there were so many of them making up one beast, or that the spells necessary to keep them together and working as a larger whole were even more painful, she didn’t know. All she knew was that even having the beast near her caused her physical pain. She could only imagine the poor creatures that had been used to make it.

  She caught Gryffon’s eye and saw that he wore the same pained grimace. Obviously he was feeling the effects as well. The thunderhead that had appeared above the portal rolled along with the passage of the beasts, and rain started pouring down on them. The clouds boiled outwards, filling the sky with a sense of dread. Crows cawed in the distance.

  All of a sudden, out of the corner of her eye, Weylyn – the hellhound she had saved – caught her eye, winding through the army, snapping at stray beasts. A sudden inspiration hit her. She had hoped at the beginning of the battle to save some of the beasts by healing them as she had the ones that had been made by the Order, but there had simply proved to be too many of them and the changes too ingrained. Many were so grotesque that it was difficult to see the animal behind the monster. Seeing Weylyn and feeling the pain of this dragon-beast gave her renewed motivation.

  She spared a moment’s concentration for an internal debate over how she might be able to erase the horrors that had been done to these poor beasts so long ago. The spells she’d used to heal Weylyn and the others would have to be modified…yes! She grasped onto an idea which would allow her to bypass the outer layers of the creatures, into the true being within. It just might work! But how would she affect them all?

  -The rain- said Gryffon’s voice in her head -use the rain.-

  Layna sent a tendril of love and thanks over their connection and set straight to work. Rather than try and focus her energy on each beast individually, she would, as Gryffon suggested, use the rain as a delivery system to get it to them all at once.

  When she had come across Weylyn for the first time – when he was one of Jezebel’s hellhounds, hunting her and Gryffon through the woods – she had seen the pain and suffering he had been through and her instincts had led her to cleanse him of the evil inflicted upon him. Her sheer determination that he be fixed allowed her to wash clean the sins committed against him, turning him back into the dog he had started out as. She focused on doing the same to all these beasts, using the rain to get it to them.

  Up in the clouds, she set her spell into motion.

  She felt Gryffon’s energy added to hers.

  She wound the spell around the water in the atmosphere, ready to spill upon the earth and onto the creatures below, so that it would wash away the blood-magic on them as it fell.

  She felt another mage’s power added, and another’s, and realized that Gryffon must be rounding them all up to help her.

  But it wasn’t enough. She strained against the limits of her own power, drawing as much as she could from those supporting her, but she knew it still wasn’t quite as much as the spell needed. The clouds lit up with an unearthly light, but the spell couldn’t release. She drew more power and felt as she began to drain the mages around her, and her own power as well.

  The amount of magic she had already expended, along with the immense strength it took to control the spell, made her weaken, and the enchantment suddenly spiraled out of control. Instea
d of her controlling the energy being taken from the mages connected to it, it began to draw up the power it needed to complete itself without reserve.

  She fought against it, trying to use herself to buffer the others, but it was too strong. She felt her legs buckling beneath her, and out of the corner of her eye, saw Gryffon falling to the ground as well. It overpowered her wearied body, and she lurched like a rag-doll beneath its ravenous appetite, as it pulled the power through her.

  She felt another power swirling around her, the energy released as the soldiers and beasts alike fell in the battle. She gritted her teeth together.

  The spell drew more power, on the verge of releasing, but Layna knew that as it did so, it would require one last burst of energy, energy that was just barely sustaining the life of the mages. Gryffon’s face was contorted with pain, as the increased magic flowing through them burned at his insides.

  The power was right there, all she had to do was take it. She wasn’t the one causing the pain and death, she would just be harnessing the power from it before it made its way back into the natural flow.

  It still felt wrong. She felt dirty even considering it. It was blood-magic, no matter how she might try to rationalize it, and she would be soiling herself by using it.

  The spell skipped, and she felt one of the lesser mages on the brink of death. If she didn’t, they would all die. In a split second, she made the decision. Reaching out to gather the energies of the dead and the dying around her, she added them to the spell in the clouds, finalizing its purpose. She screamed in agony as pain shot through her neck, where her mark was. It felt as though someone was pressing a red hot iron to her flesh and holding it there. It spread throughout her body in a white hot torrent of pain, but still she held onto the spell.