A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4)

by Travis Simmons

  Sara's feeble hands skimmed back and forth over the chunk of wood resting on her knees. Her eyes were unfocused and her head cocked to the side as if she was listening to something Maeven couldn't hear. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, steadying herself. Then, with great effort, she clasped the wood in her right hand, and trembled.

  Quickly she released it. Her eyes fluttered open to rest on her sister's face.

  "Well?" Annbell asked, setting her cup of tea down. "What do you think?"

  Sara picked up the wood with a grimace and placed it on her desk, where it sat, a relic of darkness on the cool surface. It might have been Maeven’s imagination, but the length of wood seemed to radiate a cold gloom. He shivered, wrapping his arms tightly around his chest.

  "I don't think it was a caustic attack," Sara confirmed what Headmaster Farrack and apparently Guardian Azra had been saying.

  "What do you think it is?" Annbell asked, leaning back in her chair opposite her sister.

  Sara looked off toward the west. Maeven tried to follow her gaze, but saw nothing but the wall of her office. Whatever she looked at was beyond the walls of the keep.

  "I don't want to say that it’s this rising darkness Azra keeps talking about, but something is happening. Chaotic wyrd." She nearly whispered the last, gazing down at the wood.

  "Alarist?" Annbell asked, seemingly without the aversion to the word everyone else displayed.

  Sara gave a slight nod. "I don't know what else it could be."

  "Why are they stirring?" Annbell asked. "After so long, weren't they all killed off?"

  "Apparently not," Sara said. "Probably went into hiding. Who knows what they've been doing; maybe even recruiting more."

  Maeven shuddered, imagining those wyrders sworn to Arael gathering strength once more. He hadn't been alive to see the Splitting of the World, but he knew that alarists had played a big role in the rise of darkness and the fall of the angel Pharoh LaFaye. If they were on the rise again, it couldn't mean anything good.

  "But who knows," Sara said. "Maybe this was an isolated incident, and it won't happen again."

  “Clara,” Devenstar whispered, dropping to the bottom step at the end of Kelpie Way. Cianna gazed back at the expanse of the jade bridge stretching the length of the Realm of Water. The swampy land it traversed ended a few miles back, to be replaced by lush, green fields. Behind her the fields tapered off into desert.

  “We can’t leave her!” Pi said, addressing Flora directly. “We have to look for her.”

  “How would you suggest we do that?” their teacher responded.

  “Go in there!” Pi said, her desperate desire to find her girlfriend evident in her voice.

  Cianna sat beside Devenstar and rubbed his shoulder. Clara was his sister. Cianna tried to imagine what it would be like to lose a loved one. Maybe her mind was distorted by her gift, though. She could never think of a person as completely gone when she saw ghosts all day long.

  “No one ever truly leaves us,” Cianna said to him by way of comfort. “They are always with us.”

  “And you know because you’re a necromancer,” Pi said, overhearing Cianna.

  “That’s the consensus.” Cianna nodded.

  “Can you feel her? Can you sense her?” Pi pressed, and Devenstar shook his head, a moan escaping his lips.

  Cianna stood, gathered Flora and Pi to her, and took them a ways away from where the blond man slumped at the base of the jade bridge, his hands cradling his head and knotted in his long hair.

  “I have spent every night since we lost her looking for her soul among the kelpies, and I’ve found no trace of her.”

  “But you wouldn’t,” Flora cut in. “If she had already crossed over, you wouldn’t feel her.”

  Cianna wasn’t sure if that was true or not. She’d never taken the time to sit and think if the souls that were coming to her were from the earthly plane, or from some distant afterlife. She imagined that they were earthbound; after all, why would they come to her from a different realm?

  “So there’s a chance she’s still alive?” Pi asked.

  “Why are we even discussing this?” Cianna asked, watching the young, dark-haired boy, Chy, trying to comfort Deven. “Isn’t she a sorceress? Can’t we just wait for her to meet us here?”

  “We haven’t seen her go through her trials,” Flora said, as if that meant something specific to Cianna.

  “But sorcerers are immortal, correct?” Cianna asked.

  “Only after their trials,” Pi told her. “She hasn’t been through those yet. Believe me, I would know.”

  “Doesn’t it happen during their twenty-first year?” Cianna asked.

  “Yes,” Pi said impatiently. “She is still twenty-one.”

  “We would have known. The trials take a while, and she hadn’t gone through them before we left the academy,” Flora agreed with Pi.

  Pi was silent, the wind tugging at the long lengths of her black hair and ruffling the folds of her green dress. Cianna looked back toward the marshes, where she could feel the kelpies.

  Cianna took a deep breath. “All we can do is look. But I doubt we’ll be able to find where she went over, anyway. The kelpies probably won’t let us through.”

  “They’re spirits — can’t you control them?” Pi asked.

  Cianna remembered the kelpies responding to her energy, but she’d never truly felt as though she controlled them; maybe more like she’d kept them in check. She had ordered them to consume their enemies, but that wasn’t really controlling them, just giving their desire to kill a direction.

  “There’s no telling. They aren’t exactly spirits any longer, but some residue of the soul left behind and changed by the ages,” Cianna mumbled.

  “All we can do is try,” Flora said. “Pi, gather your brother. I will check on Devenstar.”

  Cianna knew they wouldn’t be able to make it all the way back to the place where Clara had gone over, but she hoped they could make it close enough that maybe she could feel something of the girl, if distance was a factor.

  She stood alone, staring out into the grass swaying in the breeze, thinking that in the mountains she called home snow was probably starting to stick. She hated the cold, but that’s all she had to remind her of home; and now, here, surrounded by near-summer temperatures, she missed the snow. She missed the twins.

  Cianna closed her eyes and sent out a mental call to Clara. Normally she would feel a stirring in the spirit world, as if each ghost was looking around them to see if anyone recognized the call. This time she didn’t feel that.

  She opened her eyes as the others joined her. A single thought plagued her, one that she wouldn’t voice and give false hope to Pi and Deven: Clara wasn’t among the dead. Clara lived. And if she lived, that meant they had to find her.

  Sara leaned back in her chair, staring out the large office window at the snow falling steadily outside. The first week of snowfall in the mountains was always the worst, falling as hard and as resolute as any rainstorm. She seldom thought it was pretty; more a battering of the frozen elements, jamming up traffic, slowing commerce, and nearly shutting down everything in the northern half of the Realm of Earth until it stopped and was able to be cleared away.

  Hours ago it had tapered off to a light snowfall with big, lazy flakes. The kind of pretty snow that made her want to slip into bed, not into the Orb of Aldaras that rested on the table before her, glowing softly with a light of its own.

  She was getting a headache again; in fact, she was waiting for Vanparaness to bring her tea before she tried for what she needed now.

  Annbell said there was a sickness in the realm, one that Sara couldn’t feel. While either of them could have used the Orb of Aldaras, Annbell chose instead to divine through more natural means. To her twin, the orb fell within the realm of sorcery and wyrd; less natural than her druidic wisdom. How wyrd could ever be anything other than natural, Sara didn’t know.

  She sighed and straightened herself. She could
n’t wait for Van any longer. At this rate she would be prostrate on her bed by the time he brought the tea, and like every other day lately, she would be fast asleep before the afternoon Senate session. With a flick of her hand the office door locked, and the lights dimmed to the point that the orb was the main illumination, other than the overcast light filtering through her windows.

  Sara slipped her fingers around the sphere, cool and smooth beneath her hands. She shivered; it was strange how the orb could remain so cool despite the temperature of the room she sat in. She pressed her fingertips to the glass harder, like talons trying to cleave their way into it. With a disjointed sense of vertigo, Sara’s mind came free and plunged into the orb.

  Normally the Orb of Aldaras was only used to commune with the provinces and races of the Realm of Earth, but she had also found that through the relic she was able to attune herself with the realm itself, as if the orb was some extension of the realm’s spirit. If a realm had a spirit.

  She closed her eyes as her spirit merged with the orb, and she was no longer aware of the office, but instead surrounded by the filmy, misty interior of the Orb of Aldaras. Sara focused all of her wyrd on the realm, on the sickness within the realm, and wondered fleetingly if it was the chaos dwarves making the realm ill. If it was, could she then wipe their race from the realms without repercussion?

  The feeling inside the orb became hostile, and Sara took that as her answer that, no, she couldn’t commit genocide.

  “Show me the sickness,” Sara told the mist around her. It swirled for a moment, as if it didn’t know what she was talking about. “There’s sickness in the realm, show it to me. What ails the Realm of Earth?”

  The mist swirled again. Sara had a moment of dizziness, and then she was standing outside the Guardian’s Keep, looking on the snow-covered courtyard. The snowfall had created havoc, and even now servants bustled about, trying to clean up as much of it as they could, fruitless against the onslaught of yet more flakes.

  She was about to ask another question when mist invaded the scene and she felt another shifting of space, a relocation to somewhere else, someplace that felt miles from the Guardians’ Keep.

  Before her was a pedestal, and on it rested a stone the size of her fist and black as the world’s first night. Somehow, if it was even possible, the stone drank in the darkness around it, as if it were a living being, and the shadows were its sustenance.

  Sara felt a pulling at her stomach, like her very soul was being drawn with the darkness into the depths of the stone. She knew instantly what it was.

  “Wyrders’ Bane,” she whispered, clasping a hand to her cramping stomach. “Get me away from it!” she ordered the orb.

  Instantly she was launched out of the orb and back into her body with such force that the chair rocked back.

  Sara gasped for breath and sat forward, rubbing at her eyes.

  How could the stone affect her like that when it wasn’t anywhere around?

  She didn’t have long to think on it though, because there was a rising darkness in the orb, like a shadow, or a shade slipping over the light which emanated from the center of it.

  She leaned forward, watching the shadow gather closer to the surface, trying to make out a feature, but it wasn’t anything she could name; just a shadow, almost like a storm cloud.

  Was that what it was? A warning of a coming storm?

  The darkness within abated some, but not completely, leaving on the orb a residue almost like a film of ash. Sara reached for it, but her hand felt repelled, sickened as she’d felt when confronted with the stone called Wyrders’ Bane.

  “Is that what it is?” Sara wondered aloud. She gathered a handkerchief from a desk drawer and cleaned the residue off the orb. If the stone could send darkness through the orb, she was reluctant to use it again. Wyrders’ Bane knew where she was. Did it have a lock on her location?

  “Dear Goddess, Sara, it’s just a stone.” But try as she might, she couldn’t make herself fully believe that Wyrders’ Bane was just a stone any longer.

  Around midday they reached the edge of the swamp, and it became apparent they couldn’t travel into it as Pi had wanted to. From the ground up as far as Cianna’s eyes could see shimmered the opalescent barrier that kept the kelpies at bay, but that didn’t mean the kelpies still didn’t want to get at the humans looking in at them. The half-horse, half-fish creatures slammed against the barrier, trying to get out, but each time were repelled back further in the swamp, as the barrier sparked at their touch.

  “Can’t you do something?” Pi pleaded with Cianna.

  “No. I can influence them, but like I said before, they are a different type of creature, they won’t obey my whim.”

  “But you made them kill!” Pi said. She was really starting to irritate Cianna.

  “All the kelpies want is for others to join them. I didn’t make them kill, I just gave them a target. Besides, I felt for Clara before, right after the battle, and I couldn’t feel her then, when we were standing directly over the place where she had gone over. I doubt there’s anything to feel.”

  “But what does that mean?” Devenstar asked, his eyes dark, his voice solemn.

  Cianna sighed. “I don’t want to give you false hope, because I really don’t know. But I suspect she has either already crossed over, or she is not dead after all.”

  “How is that false hope? If she isn’t dead, then she is stuck out there with them, unable to get out,” Pi said. “Do something!”

  “You do something dammit! All you’ve been doing this entire time is whining at me, making demands of me that aren’t fair since I can’t do a Goddess-damned thing about it. I’m sorry she fell over the edge, but I have someplace to be. If you want to search for her, then do so, I can’t.”

  “Just like that,” Devenstar said. “You’re leaving us?”

  “This was never a permanent thing. I would like you to come with me, but if you are bent on finding her, and I can’t help, what good will I do?”

  “Fine, go. We’re staying here.” Pi said.

  Cianna looked to Flora; the old lady only nodded, granting Cianna permission to leave. But there was a look in her eyes — pleading, maybe? No, it was more accusatory. It was a look that wounded Cianna beyond words, because in that look she knew she had disappointed Flora.

  Cianna turned to leave, and even made it a couple steps before she stopped.

  What would she do if it had been the twins? What if her friends had fallen over the edge? She would probably make the same demands Pi was making now.

  She watched Pi gathering wyrd about her, channeling it down her arms until sage-green fire wreathed her hands. She pressed her hands to the opalescent wall holding the figures of the kelpies at bay: the fire fizzled out. Useless.

  Cianna sighed and stomped back. More than anything it was the hurt in Deven’s eyes that changed her mind. She couldn’t leave him to deal with this. She couldn’t leave any of them. Flora reminded her of a mother she’d never known, and all of them were as close to a family as she had seen this entire time. They had accepted her into their fold without any questions. No matter how the Necromancers’ Mosque dragged her on, she couldn’t leave them to deal with this alone.

  She might only be able to influence the kelpies, but that was better than they could do. With any luck she would be able to at least keep the creatures from feasting on her friends.

  “We need to figure out a way to get inside the barrier,” Cianna told them, bundling her long dark hair up in a bun at the base of her neck. “Don’t bring it down completely, because then the kelpies will get out.”

  Deven brightened when Cianna came back, and his smile made her heart skip a beat.

  “I can’t influence it at all,” Pi said. If she was still angry with Cianna, it didn’t show. She turned to Flora. “Is there anything you can do?”

  “And someone needs to stay here with Chy; I won’t have him going in there with us, in case something happens. Better if I only have to
protect a couple of people,” Cianna said. She dropped her travel pack to the ground and made sure her weapons were easily at hand, though she didn’t know what good they would be against such creatures. Her rapier was at the ready, and her crossbow in easy reach.

  “She’s my sister, I’m going,” Devenstar declared.

  “She’s my girlfriend, I’m going too.” Pi was resolute.

  “I will stay back. I’ve trained them well enough that they should be fine. Now let’s see what we can do about that barrier.” Flora stepped forward.

  It was the largest, most magnificent tree either of them had ever seen. Angelica and Jovian stood before the massive trunk, its branches stretching up higher than their eyes could see; so far, in fact, that Jovian imagined that the leaves were not even part of this world, but existed somewhere outside of it, in the cosmos themselves. But up there in the sky, there weren’t any stars, or a sun, or even a moon — only a great expanse of violet light. He had seen this light before when he and Angelica had taken the dark flower infusion. That violet sky was the light of the Goddess, the Everafter.

  Down the trunk, and pattering lightly from the leaves like rain, they could see silver drops of something that might be liquid. From their shared memories, Jovian knew that it wasn't rain at all, but wyrd.

  Angelica had been here before, in a dream, and it was through that shared memory that Jovian recognized this place for what it was. The overgrown courtyard and the gigantic well surrounding the impossibly large trunk of the Evyndelle stood before them in all their glory.

  “The Well of Wyrding,” Jovian breathed reverently. In fact, it was the first time in his life that he had ever been awed in a way that he would call religious.

  “It's healing,” Angelica said, wonder in her eyes. “Grace must have done it. Grace changed the course of wyrd!”

  But then the thought intruded on both of them instantly. At what cost? They had seen what had become of Grace, Rosalee, and Dalah. They had been attacked by them. They had seen Grace use wyrd, when they had never known her to possess any.