He instantly stopped running, and it was a few moments before his companion realized that she was running alone. She whirled around and cried, “What in the Soul Wastes are you doing, Ethan? We have to try to get help! It’s our duty as Foresters!”
“We can’t make it this way,” he said just above a whisper.
May froze as solid as a block of ice when she saw Ethan’s eyes begin to shed a faint blue light. As the glow strengthened he said in a hollow emotionless voice, “May, hurry over to me. I can’t see you.”
He sounded frightened and so was she, but she swallowed down her fear and crept back towards the Vharian. When she reached him she reached out with her trembling hands and placed them on both of Ethan’s bare sweaty arms, surprisingly hard and corded as they flexed, tension infected every inch of his wiry body. He stared right at her with his glowing blue eyes, but the stare was emotionless and vacant and she knew that he couldn’t see her.
She then felt a slight gust of wind emanate from Ethan. It was just enough to stir her hair and few blades of grass, but it shocked her like the gusts in a windstorm. The insects and frogs that had been so very vocal in their chorus as the two Forester’s had been sprinting down the river bank instantly and utterly silenced. The very forest in which they stood seemed to grow still and quiet so that one could think that they could even hear the mist moving. All at once the light of the fireflies was snuffed out and the shadowed woods became darker still, and Ethan’s illuminated eyes seemed to grow brighter.
“Ethan, what’s happening?” she whispered in shaky hushed tones.
Suddenly she felt ripples of energy in the body of the Vharian. They came like waves from his head to his feet and back again, and with each wave of energy more wind emanated from Ethan’s body, gusting outward into May and the surrounding woods. Her ponytail came undone and her shoulder-length blond hair danced in the wind above her dark brown woolen cloak that flapped in the gusts. As the winds intensified May gripped Ethan’s flexed arms as hard as she could so she didn’t get blown back from him and she trembled furiously. Tears of relief streamed down her plump cheeks when Ethan reached out and put his arms around her and pulled her in to him in a full-bodied embrace. She buried her face into his neck, and thus thankfully couldn’t see what followed.
The wind pouring from Ethan quit coming in waves, but instead flooded out as an endless continuously-intensifying blast of air that deluged in all directions around the embracing Foresters. The old thick limbs of the ancient willows and cedars that stood like solemn witnesses to this wonder creaked and groaned in strain. Grass and ground-foliage that shrouded the forest floor where they stood laid flat in the gusts before being uprooted and cast furiously away into the darkness. The mist was forced far back from the two just as moonlight poured through a rift that was torn in the cloud-cover far overhead, precisely above where Ethan and May stood. The pale sapphire moonlight mingled with the bright blue luminescence that poured from the storyteller’s eyes and he clenched his jaw, revealing his gritted teeth, at the carnage that ripped through and from his thin body.
The gusts reached a new level as blue light began to throb from the earth upon which the two companions stood embracing. It began to spiral up the duo in a double helix like the tendrils of some otherworldly nightmarish monstrosity. Abruptly then branches and tree limbs of the nearby trees snapped from their trunks and were dashed throughout the surrounding wood, shattering upon other tree trunks that also bent away from Ethan. The far shore of the Three Baronies River began flooding into the surrounding forest as the running waters were pushed away from the shore upon which the storyteller stood.
When the wind became its strongest the nearest trees that bent away from Ethan began to groan deeply in protest and crack around the trunk, sending shards of bark flying away through the forest. The pair of them were now completely cocooned in the blue light, and even that very light seemed to be being blown away from Ethan as ribbons of it snaked sideways in all directions, weaving around and between the strained trees.
Then, instantly, the light erupted upward in a thin straight column, a pillar to the stars that seemed to go up forever until it reached the Ancestor Lands. All sound instantly vanished in the surrounding woods that instant, and the furious winds abruptly ceased, completely and utterly. Discarded leaves, stones, and twigs rained down from the air as their supernatural journey suddenly stopped and the bowed trees shot back to their original position, sending what was left of their foliage showering down amongst the churned detritus of the forest floor. Only the thick pillar of blue light remained there, a beacon of Wizardcraft in a world where Wizardcraft was dead.
In the time of a hummingbird’s heartbeat the pillar of light exploded sending shards of intense cerulean light ripping though the nearby forest. In a blink every tree for five miles in every direction completely shattered into splinters as long as a child’s finger and the ground in that part of the forest quaked so furiously that its tremors could be felt adamantly from Stone’s Shore to Greenwell City. The waters of the Three Baronies River poured from their banks, flooding into the surrounding woods for miles where they would soon become land-locked and stagnant and become swampland to the south of Stone’s Shore.
Eventually, though, that night the carnage and turmoil subsided and all lay quiet and still for miles around. The River of the Three Baronies resumed its course to the Bay of Dawn and the fog and fireflies came back to the woods. The ten-mile wide section of woods that Ethan and May had once stood in the center of, though, laid empty and bare save for piles of pulverized wood and debris that floated in heaps throughout the churning shallow muddy waters. The two Foresters were nowhere to be found.
It seemed that Wizardcraft had returned to the land of the Three Baronies, and Ethan Skalderholt was its herald.
Chapter Thirteen
A Deep Wolf’s Burning Bite
There were no words to describe the sudden bewildering journey that the Foresters took that night. It was horror and ecstasy, fear and joy, light and dark, civil and savage, hideous and gorgeous, all at once. The Ancestor Lands smiled at them and the Soul Wastes frowned. One could simply say that they were there and then they were here.
A few seconds after the world dissolved into blue nothingness May once again felt firm ground beneath her booted feet. Ethan crumpled away from her, crashing into an unconscious heap on the ground, and she was left there standing, eyes closed tightly and shaking in awe. Somehow she remained standing and eventually eased open her eyelids. She beheld a quiet night-enveloped wood of ancient oaks interspersed with pretty birch groves. The half-moon was behind her to the north and the hot summer air laid heavily on her. Their journey took them through time and space where temperature held no meaning and neither did sanity.
She intently scanned her surroundings until she could be positive that she was still in the Three Baronies. The thought made her smile and shake her head in wonder. It seemed even a little hotter and drier than where she and Ethan had been moments before, and she came to the conclusion that they must be over a hundred miles south of Greenwell City, halfway to Woodend which was on the border between the Barony of Greenwell and the Barony of Wendlith. As the awe and shock began to subside she thought of Ethan and shot her gaze down to the ground where he laid. May gasped.
Ethan lay unconscious on the forest floor which was shrouded in short dark ferns and oak leaves. But he was changed. Vibrant blue lines curved and snaked up the bare flesh of his slender arm between the cuff of his gauntlets and the shoulders of his leather cuirass. They glowed slightly with pale azure radiance but they quickly dimmed until the colored lines remained tattooed into his flesh. The mysterious serpentine sigils had no meaning to May, and she was horrified and confused when they didn’t eventually disappear from her friend’s naked arms after a few tense moments.
She knelt down in the ferns next to him and began to hurriedly unbuckle his Forester’s cuirass. With a huff she pulled the piece of hide armor over his head and tos
sed it to the ground beside them. Ethan’s thin muscular torso rose and fell heavily with each breath, and despite the beads of sweat that peppered his bare chest and arms he shivered as though he lay naked in the Ice Wilds. Thankfully though, May noticed, the blue sigils ended just slightly past the point where his shoulders connected with his chest.
“Ethan. Ethan, can you hear me?” May asked in a voice only slightly tinged in panic.
There was no reply from the unconscious storyteller except for a slight furrowing of his damp brow. That was good enough for May. She looked around once again at the surroundings that they had been whisked away to. Once May had her bearings on directions she grabbed Ethan’s limp arm, which was almost scalding to the touch, and heaved her companion onto her shoulders. She struggled mightily to stand, but after she finally got good footing she stood shakily to her feet, Ethan’s floppy form hanging from both shoulders. The Vharian weighed as much as she did, but May had trained herself to carry heavy loads if the need was evident. Tonight it surely was evident.
She took off at a steady clip southward, her back to the glaring half-moon. With the one-hundred and thirty pound load on her shoulders in addition to all of their equipment, May grunted and sweated more and more with each heavy stride. Numerous brambles and rotted logs forced her into a dangerous leap or a lengthy detour and the sweltering heat of the summer night laid heavily on her as though she were carrying another person in addition to Ethan.
After a horrendously tiring and strenuous twenty minutes passed, May felt reasonably comfortable that they had covered a fair amount of distance. She did not know, though, how far away or in what direction Kraegovich was. Her best guess was south because that was the direction the old Forester was heading according to Ethan’s vision. The thought of his vision and the thought of him transporting the two of them scores and scores of miles in an instant brought her to a slow distracted stop. Panting like a wolf she lowered her friend onto a dewy bed of grass and spongy mushrooms.
Ethan had used Wizardcraft. At least she thought it was Wizardcraft from what little mythic tales of ancient heroes of the Ancient Age she had been told by her mother and other Foresters of the Three Baronies as she was growing up. It was even whispered among Foresters that the legendary founder of the order, Lady Quinn the Martyr, used Wizardcraft herself though it was never documented in any tomes or stories. But what she had witnessed tonight could be nothing but the Wizardcraft of old. That meant that Ethan was a Wizard, the first known Wizard to be born in a thousand years. What that could mean, she did not know. What could that mean for the land of the Three Baronies?
As she pondered that troubling thought, a snapping twig diverted her attention whole-heartedly into the ominous woodland darkness that surrounded them. For some reason she knew that it was the wood-wise Kraegovich, who had luckily found them before May got her and Ethan lost deep on the sparsely-populated southern half of the Forests of Greenwell. Unfortunately May was wrong.
From the darker shadows around them stepped a Deep Wolf. May had seen Deep Wolves once, as two took down a mighty stag in a fit of yips and snarls. This was completely different. The attention of the animal was focused entirely on her and it was a lot bigger up close. To make matters ultimately worse two more of the Greenwellian beasts crept from the darkness on different sides of the small break in the trees in which the Foresters found themselves so that the dangerous wild beasts formed a triangle around the humans that was quickly getting smaller. Clouds racing in the hot summer wind dispersed from the sky above the break in the canopy, and as pure pale blue moonlight hauntingly shimmered into the imminent battleground May gasped at the true nature of the creatures around her.
These were not the ordinary Deep Wolves that she had seen the year before. In fact, these beasts were unlike anything in the wilds of the Three Baronies she had ever heard of. The beasts were the same size as Deep Wolves, nearly the size of a healthy mare, and they were covered in shaggy coarse black fur, blacker than the night. What marked them as different were their grotesque faces.
Their eyes were a pure sickly greenish-yellow color and were completely without a pupil, and their muzzles were rotted or scalded away to the bone with thin wiry strands of tissue holding the bottom jaw to the top. Flowing from the mouths of the horrid faces of the Deep Wolves, between razor-sharp corroded fangs, was a deluge of putrid yellow runny liquid. As strands of it dripped from the terrifying maws of the beasts and plopped into the vegetation of the forest floor there arose popping and sizzling noises accompanied by lines of swirling smoke that rose into the still stuffy forest air beneath the canopy of the trees. It was acid that was slobbered from the awful jaws, and May was sure that a single bite would be the last of her, if not from the deadly teeth that lined the powerful jaws than the potent scalding acid that was sure to enter any open wounds caused by a bite, and hungrily dissolve her flesh and bones.
May swallowed bile that arose in her throat, with a thick lump of horror and terror, and she stoically resolved to go down fighting against these terrible beasts. She would protect Ethan, maybe the only man she had ever kissed out of what might be love, as he laid in a trouble sleep. She would protect him until the monsters left her ripped open and boiling on the smoking detritus of the forest floor. To do that, she needed an edge.
She eased her own silver hand axe from her belt, and also bent down and used her shaky fingers to pry Ethan’s hand axe from his own waist. An axe in each firm gauntleted grip, May stared into the vacant eyes of the nearest Deep Wolf, the first that entered the clearing, and she twirled the hand axes, radiant in the moonlight. “Let’s do this, you bastards.”
May charged forward swinging her right axe in a brilliant vertical downward chop. The beast jerked its atrocious head back just in time to avoid the chop but an instant later the silver hand axe in May’s left hand raced in horizontally and chopped into the right side of the Wolf’s skull with a splintering crunch. It let out a yelp that almost made May smile for she knew finally that these Deep Wolves could feel pain. The successful attack forced the beast to recoil in sudden pain and the weapon was jerked from her left hand. Still the blade stayed embedded in the creature’s head, though it shook its head furiously to dislodge it. May then noticed smoke snaking from the axe wound. Great, she thought, acid for blood as well.
As it reeled in shock from that first devastating attack, May came forward with her remaining hand axe and hacked it as hard as she could into the skull of the beast, right between its terrible eyes. She knew that the attack would cost the Forester her other axe as well for the acid would eventually eat the silver blade away, but before that happened she would make some more use of it. She placed her foot on the back of its neck to provide her leverage as she finally jerked the smoldering weapon from its head, and she immediately brought it down in another downward chop that hacked deep into its neck, straight through its spinal column.
The large body of the Deep Wolf jerked spasmodically and shuddered as its nerves made their last attempt at animating the body, and then the horrible beast collapsed loosely to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. May helped it along the way to the ground as she stomped her foot furiously into the back of its neck.
The Forester whirled around to see that the other two Deep Wolves were bounding at her, only about ten feet from her. She smiled at her predicament. She gripped a single smoking hand axe, the acid having turned it into more of bludgeoning weapon than an axe. She was alone against two extremely bizarre and dangerous beasts. “I’ll go down fighting,” she assured herself in whisper as they closed the distance to her.
Suddenly the head of the one to her left was cleaved from its sinewy neck by the wide steel blade of a sword. The corpse of the Deep Wolf smashed into May, knocking her out of the way of the snapping scalding jaws of the other beast, and she was pinned onto her back on the ground with this hulking monster atop her. In horror she watched helplessly as acid flowed from the gaping wound where its head was once attached and poured
onto her leather breastplate. She tried to lift the Deep Wolf from her, but it was to no avail. The headless corpse of the monster had to weigh nearly six-hundred pounds. So May began to scream for help.
Kraegovich stood tall in the moonlit little clearing and stared confusedly at the smoldering blade of his longsword as it began to corrode before his eyes. “What in the name of the Ancestors?” he began but he was interrupted when the remaining Deep Wolf turned on its heel and sprinted towards him growling and snarling. May also began screaming from her position on the ground with the dead beast. Other matters took precedence.
The aged Forester gripped his soon-to-be-ruined sword in a taut two-handed grip that caused his huge arms and chest to bulge in tense strain awaiting release in a violent sudden attack. The Deep Wolf struck first as it leapt at the Forester. Kraegovich whirled to the side and the beast’s sizzling jaws smashed shut on his cloak where it was pinned beneath his chin. As it tore the cloak from Kraegovich’s hulking form with its acid-drenched maw he could feel its coarse hair brush across his face and he smelt the putrid bile-reeking stench of the acid.
It landed with a growl and began violently shaking the cloak in its jaws, whipping it back and forth in frenzied rage. Kraegovich stalked up behind the creature and let loose a horrific horizontal two-handed slash from right to left. The swipe of the ragged blade cut through the right back leg of the Wolf and continued on to cleave through the left back leg as well. Before it could cry out or attempt to escape Kraegovich used the momentum of that tremendous attack to spin himself an agile counter-clockwise rotation. As he came back around in a flourish to face the hindquarters of his wounded foe, it began to collapse, due to the severing of its back legs. He plunged his sword of melting steel into the beast’s abdomen with a tremendous two-handed lunge. It managed a feeble whine from its corroded muzzle as it collapsed into death on the forest floor.
The Azure Wizard Page 12
