A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4)

by Travis Simmons

  Jovian knew it was true. The Well of Wyrding was healing. The memory Angelica had of this place played back in his mind. Jovian could see the green poison of the corrupted wyrd hanging over the silver, pure wyrd he watched trickle and drip down into the well, the repository of wyrd.

  Hesitantly he stepped forward, his feet brushing aside leaves that had previously fallen from the tree. A breeze stirred them, pushing them across the courtyard with a melodious rustle, clearing a path before him directly to the stairs that wound up the side of the well.

  “We don't belong here,” Angelica said.

  Jovian felt it too. There was a feeling inside of him that at any moment they might get caught. He hadn't felt that way since he was a child, going through the kitchens at night, knowing that he shouldn't be there, and fearing that at any moment Grace might come in on him and he would be in trouble.

  In the branches above, a wind stirred that couldn't be felt as far down as Angelica and Jovian were. He looked up, his head dizzy at the impossible height of the tree, and almost felt like the tree was conveying something to him.

  “The tree feels it too.” Angelica stepped up beside her brother, and gazed at the impossible height of the branches.

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don't know. But don't you feel it?” Angelica asked.

  “The tree . . . does it fear us?” Jovian asked. He looked up at the Evyndelle. It didn’t look afraid. But there was an air of fear hanging over the place. Like they were something putrid treading on hallowed ground. The air quivered around them.

  “That's absurd.” Angelica tried laughing, but she couldn't quite bring herself to.

  At their presence the tree shivered.

  Jovian paused, one foot on the first step. There was a shift in the air. Something was happening — the air felt like someone had taken a giant breath and was holding it, waiting. His ears felt stifled, like pressure was building in his head.

  Then, as though gravity had tilted, the drops of wyrd slowed their steady progression down toward the well. One lone drop of wyrd fell toward Angelica, landing on her cheek. Where the drop of wyrd touched, Angelica felt warmth absorb into her flesh, like liquid sunshine.

  “What?” she said. Stepping back, Angelica brushed at her cheek.

  “What was that?” Jovian asked, but there was no time for an answer, because more drops of wyrd followed the first one. Slowly, methodically, the drops of wyrd slid from the base of the tree and drifted through the air toward Angelica and Jovian, landing on them like rain falling to the earth, seeking home in the soil.

  Where the wyrd touched, their skin glowed.

  It was reverie. Jovian smiled at the feel of the wyrd, like electricity humming across his skin. He moved backward off the steps and went to Angelica’s side.

  But slowly the good feelings were replaced by understanding.

  The sky darkened, as if a storm was coming. Inky black started bleeding through the violet light above. Jovian looked up into the troubled sky, the home of the Goddess, at the crown of the tree. What was happening?

  “But, if the tree is giving us its wyrd…” Angelica looked toward the tree, and noticed for the first time that it looked old, tired.

  “The wyrd feeds the tree,” Jovian said. He couldn’t take his eyes off the sky.

  “And it’s giving it to us,” she said, trying to bat away drops of wyrd. “No, go back!” She tried commanding it, but the wyrd was drawn to them. Angelica held her hands out, an intense look of concentration on her face as she tried wyrding the power back to the tree where it belonged.

  “What if the tree isn't giving us the wyrd at all?” Jovian asked. He looked at the well and realized it was aging. Even as he watched, one of the stones crumbled away to dust, sifting to the tiled courtyard.

  “We need to get out of here,” Angelica insisted.

  “But how?” Jovian asked, trying to ignore the rain of wyrd falling horizontally from the tree toward them.

  “Here, take my hands and close your eyes.”

  Jovian grabbed Angelica's hands and closed his eyes as she instructed.

  There was an unsteady shifting beneath his feet, and Jovian listed to the side. A sensation of falling, and when he felt an impact, he opened his eyes with a start.

  They weren't alone. Around them stood hundreds, maybe thousands of people, all looking at a point in the distance, behind Jovian. There was a wind — in fact that was the only noise Jovian heard. The people stood, eyes unfocused, mouths hanging open, raptured by something behind him that he couldn’t see.

  Are they dead? he wondered.

  Angelica was facing the same direction as all the other people, and her hands went to her mouth.

  “What is it?” Jovian asked.

  The light steadily grew in brightness behind Jovian, and everyone covered their eyes from it, including Angelica. Jovian wasn't comforted by the thought that Angelica was behaving so similarly to all those people around them. As if they were all puppets being moved by the same hands, and Angelica was falling in line with them. Jovian didn't want to look at the point in the distance, but he knew he had to.

  He stood on shaky knees and turned to see what everyone else was seeing.

  At first there was nothing but light, slowly waning until he could see the point where it originated.

  When he saw it for the first time, he felt the same laxity fall over his muscles. He felt something else sliding into place over his current thoughts, over whatever it was inside of him that made him Jovian LaFaye. It was a force alien to the power he’d felt before, from the well. If the well showed him the wyrd of humans, this was showing him something else. Power of an Otherworldly kind.

  There stood a tower made of turquoise. It hadn’t been built, he knew that instantly, but had instead grown out of the ground, twisting toward the sky, as if some heavenly host had summoned it from the depths of the earth. Along the front, stairs wound their way up to a balcony. There was a central building, reaching up toward the sky, and beside that two other structures stood, like sharply pointed wings.

  Again, the light started beneath the surface of the tower, and grew in strength until Jovian, too, had to cover his eyes or be blinded.

  As the light strengthened, screaming started around him, and the sound of something tearing. The smell of blood. Wet noises. Jovian couldn't make sense out of it, but his blood throbbed in his ears, as if he knew with every fiber of his being what was happening. It was the reason they had come here, these hundreds, thousands of people.

  Nephilim

  The word was burned in his mind, as was this place.

  The Turquoise Tower.

  He both revered it and feared it. Its power was terrible and awesome.

  Pain seared his back like a burning brand. He fell to his knees, and his voice carried up to the heavens with all the others.

  As the light softened, the screaming also subsided into sobs of pain. There was blood everywhere, and fragments of skin littered the ground as far as the eye could see. The people were no longer people.

  They were angels.

  A scream somewhere in the distance woke Angelica and Jovian into reality.

  “What was that?” Jovian gasped for air, trying to adjust his sight to the darkness, the sunflowers providing the barest illumination to the air around them.

  “Guess,” Joya whispered.

  “We must make haste to the Haunted Graveyard,” Uthia said, coming back to them from where she had kept watch earlier in the night.

  “How far?” Angelica asked.

  “Far enough that you had better start praying we make it in time,” Uthia responded, prodding them all into action.

  There was no camp to break: no fire to put out, and no bedrolls to pack up, since they had forgotten them with the horses. And it was good, because they were on a steady sprint to a destination none of them, save Uthia, knew.

  Uthia flicked her arm down and they saw it grow in length, a jagged edge along one side and a
sharp one along the other, despite being made of wood. Then it came apart from her arm, and there it was, her wooden sword Cataresh.

  Jovian and Angelica took their cue from her and checked their shin-buto blades, ensuring they were ready. They didn’t know what they were going to do. Last time they had met the hecklin they had graveyard dirt to ward them off; they hadn’t had to fight the beasts.

  From his classes Jovian knew that their skin was tough, like steel. The only point of weakness was around their neck. He prayed they reached the graveyard before they had to fight them. If this was a pack like the one they had seen in the Sacred Forest, they would be no match for it. Not even Joya, with her newfound command of wyrd, would be much use.

  But she was readying herself. Even now her hands glowed slightly pink, warning that she was channeling wyrd and ready to cast it out.

  Behind them the hecklin bayed the bone-chilling sound of their hunting. They were getting closer. Jovian could hear them now, thundering across the ground behind them. In the darkness he thought he could see their ghostly white pelts flashing through pools of sunflower light.

  “They’re going to cut us off!” Jovian yelled over the thundering of his own heart.

  Uthia only nodded, her long legs carrying her awkwardly through the forest.

  “Keep running!” she commanded. Uthia darted to the right, out of sight. There was a yelp and then a thud, as something gigantic slammed into the ground closer to them than Jovian wanted to think about.

  She rejoined them, blood coating the edge of her blade and a large lupine head in her hands, held by the ears. She didn’t say anything to them, only lobbed the head over them in an arc to the trail behind.

  “Give them fair warning we are armed, and we know how to kill them.” Uthia didn’t appear to have so much as a scratch on her. If he wasn’t so scared, Jovian would have appreciated the fact that Uthia had taken out one hecklin faster than he could blink. His fear abated a little.

  “How much further?” Angelica asked.

  “Keep running,” Uthia said. A look flashed over her face that told them she didn’t know if they would make it or not.

  Joya took aim behind her, and an arc of pink lightning sizzled the air around them, lancing backward. They saw a flash of pink as it struck something. Another yelp. Another thud.

  Could her wyrd really kill them? Or had it merely been wounded?

  Keep running, Jove, he told himself. It didn’t matter, did it? They weren’t immortal. Just because weapons had to find a specific spot on their bodies didn’t mean wyrd couldn’t harm them. The warning in class came back to him. He remembered only holy power could kill them. Was that true?

  Joya seemed pleased with what happened, and so she launched another bolt of pink lightning behind them. This time it was thicker, and as it reached back, lighting up the darkness, it forked and took out several more hecklin.

  “Keep going, daughter of the LaFaye,” Uthia told her, and darted to the left, dispatching another hecklin.

  That was it. Joya could kill them because her power was part holy. She was half angel. When was he ever going to stop forgetting that?

  His knees burned and his lungs ached with the need for air, but he couldn’t stop.

  “We should stand and fight them,” he suggested.

  “There is more than one pack out there,” Uthia said. “Even with my blade and Joya’s wyrd, we wouldn’t be able to face them all. Even dryads and anakim sorcerers tire.”

  The howling came again, this time before them.

  “Joya, concentrate your energy ahead, I’m going up there,” Uthia said. She gave in to her long legs and outpaced them all, running at a speed Jovian’s eyes couldn’t follow. There was more yelping.

  Joya flung her hands out, one after another, like she was throwing a ball. Each time an arc of lightning thundered out of her fingers, lancing toward points in the distance they couldn’t see, but by the sound each one hit its mark.

  Before long they were leaping over the fallen bodies of the hecklin and their severed heads. Jovian tried not to pay attention to the blood and gore, and instead keep his eyes focused.

  A ghostly flash beside him, so close Jovian could see the hecklin’s teeth, spurred him to action. He drew his blade and lashed out. It was to no avail — the shin-buto sliced skin, but not the metallic flesh beneath. The beast jumped to the side, out of sight.

  There was a flash of wood as Uthia streaked by him, and the hecklin that had accosted him yelped and thumped onto the ground.

  The dryad fell in line beside them.

  “We’re almost there. Joya, we need more ahead, they’re trying to stop us from reaching the graveyard.”

  Joya’s eyebrows furrowed and she held both of her hands out. The lightning was like a storm now, not giving up, continuously licking the ground and striking at chaos hounds as it went.

  They were almost there, and the hecklin were gathering closer, blocking their way. Then it happened.

  Joya held up her hands one last time. She pushed them forward, as if pressing them through mud, and then flung them to her sides.

  The darkness around the hecklin solidified, and the hounds were scattered, thrown further back into the woods, away from the iron fence of the Haunted Graveyard.

  “Excellent,” Uthia said. She grabbed Jovian and Angelica and leaped over the fence, carrying them with her. She landed expertly on the shifting, gravelly dirt of the graveyard. Jovian, dizzy from the flight, stumbled and fell to the ground, nearly knocking his head against a grave marker.

  Joya crested the fence without an issue, despite it being twice her height. Slowly she settled on the ground beside them, and when her wyrd released her, she fell in a gasping heap next to Jovian.

  “What was that?” Angelica asked once she found her breath. “What did you do with the shadows?”

  Joya only shook her head. “Some kind of wyrd, I think.” She itched at her palms.

  “Stop,” Jovian said, taking her hands in his own. “You’re going to itch them raw.”

  “I can’t help it. They burn,” Joya protested.

  “Is there something wrong? Are you not feeling well?” Jovian asked.

  “I’m fine, why do you ask?” Joya looked at him.

  “Because, your stigmata — it’s not white any longer.”

  “What in the realms are you talking about?” Angelica said, scooting closer. “Stigmata don’t change, no matter if you’re sick or not.”

  “Then why are they gray?” Jovian asked.

  Joya looked frightened as Angelica leaned over her hands.

  “Maybe dirt?” Angelica licked her finger and made to scrub at Joya’s palm.

  “Ew, stop that. Don’t be disgusting. It’s nothing, I’m sure.” Joya tugged her hands free of her sister’s grasp.

  “How long have they been itching?” Jovian asked.

  “What are you, a healer?” Joya asked him.

  Jovian raised an eyebrow. Joya sighed.

  “When we got to the border to the Shadow Realm they started itching. And I’m not sure if I’m imagining it, but when I channel my wyrd it feels different — odd.” Joya stood with the help of a headstone. “I’m fine. Can we stop focusing on me, and take a moment to appreciate our situation?”

  “And that is?” Angelica looked around them at the ancient gravestones. The place was huge, and large mausoleums stood here and there, covered in ivy and sunflowers, giving the Haunted Graveyard an eerie feel beyond the fact that it was a place of the dead.

  “That we are trapped in the Haunted Graveyard, a place no living person has been said to stay in for any length of time and survive.” Joya shivered and looked around, entranced by their baleful surroundings.

  “I think we might have been safer with the hecklin,” Jovian agreed.

  “When it opens, you won’t have long before it closes again,” Flora told them. She had spent the better part of the morning trying to align her wyrd with the ancient barrier. It was a strong working �
�� she had told them she felt that many “flavors” of wyrd had gone into the warding. Most likely it had been added onto and fortified over the years, or many wyrders had worked the creation of it.

  “Will you be able to open it again when we come back?” Cianna wanted to know.

  “I should be able to,” Flora nodded.

  “Should?” Devenstar asked.

  “I don’t want to give you any hopes here. It’s a strong warding, it’s fighting me. I think I have found a keyhole of sorts, and my wyrd seems to know what it takes to unlock it, but there’s no telling how often I can do it, or if I can even replicate it again. Each time I try, the warding draws me in. If I connect for too long I could be lost.” Flora looked up at the boundary with something close to fear in her eyes.

  “Alright, let’s do it,” Cianna said, taking a deep breath.

  “Get ready. My wyrd is aligned, it will only take a moment,” Flora told them. Once they all nodded she closed her eyes and pointed a long, slender finger commandingly at the border.

  At first nothing happened, but then a sizzling sound came to the air and sparks shone in the afternoon light, carving an arch out of the opalescent energy of the boundary.

  The three of them shifted closer to the border, and Cianna got her wyrd ready, placing it as best as she could around the opening Flora was creating. They would have to be quick, and Cianna would have to push with all of her wyrd to hold the kelpies at bay.

  The boundary opened before them along the seams of the arch, and Cianna pushed her wyrd forward, motioning Deven and Pi into the opening ahead of her.

  She felt the kelpies struggling around the newly formed orb surrounding her companions. This would be difficult for her, but she had agreed. Cianna stepped into the marshy landscape.

  The barrier sealed behind them, and Cianna took a deep breath. She looked behind her at Flora and Chy, and the boy waved cheerily at them. Cianna wasn’t sure if he understood the danger or not, but she waved back. Looking out of this land was different than looking in. It seemed like she was peering through a film of shifting water, constantly distorting what she saw on the other side and throwing back shafts of light, bent as they would be underwater.