A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4)

by Travis Simmons

  “Who are you?” Cianna asked. She remembered Flora telling her about the loa in the Realm of Fire, and imagined this was Mama Brigit, as the old sorceress had described. Easing forward one tentative step at a time, Cianna tried in vain to trust this stranger who beckoned her forth. But still, she tested the ground in front of her before placing the full weight of her body on her foot.

  “In time. For now, you must learn to trust me. Stop,” the woman said. Cianna stopped. “Very good, a quick learner,” the woman cooed. Her voice was soothing to Cianna's ears, and she relaxed a little.

  Follow her orders; I can do that, she thought.

  “Turn to the left and take five steps. Before you there is a pedestal.”

  Cianna obeyed, and the woman spoke true. Five steps took her exactly in front of a pedestal.

  “On it, you will find a plate of food. Take a bite.”

  “What is it?” Cianna asked.

  “Obey,” the woman said.

  There was no choice. She imagined the walls shoved full of decomposing bodies of would-be necromancers who’d come this way and failed to obey. Her bones wouldn't be joining theirs.

  She reached forward, feeling around blindly until her hand hit a cold plate. She explored it with her fingers and soon felt a mound of food, cold to the touch, and somewhat slimy. Her stomach churned, and her nose crinkled. Cianna thought she heard the woman chuckle behind her, though it could have been her imagination.

  She tentatively grabbed a small piece of whatever it was and put it in her mouth. The taste was awful, and bile rose in her throat.

  “It's better to chew and swallow without thinking about it,” the woman said.

  Cianna screwed her eyes shut, despite not being able to see anything anyway, and chewed just enough to break the food up so she could swallow it. She coughed, and fought with herself to keep the food down. After several sweaty moments, an ache in her stomach, and shaking in her limbs, Cianna straightened.

  “That was awful. What was it?” Cianna asked. But there would be no answer.

  “Turn right. Take ten steps forward, and there will be another pedestal.”

  Cianna hesitated for a moment, but just as she imagined Mama Brigit telling her to obey, she followed her commands. Again, she was at the edge of another pedestal.

  “Drink,” Brigit said.

  Cianna reached forward, her hand knocking into a stone beaker. Hastily she grabbed it before any of the contents could spill. She raised it to her nose, and before she could stop herself, she inhaled. The smell of iron and the musky scent of meat that was long past rotting came to her nose. She coughed.

  “Love to punish yourself, I see,” Mama Brigit said. “Drink.”

  Cianna pressed the glass to her mouth, the thick fluid passing her lips like mud. She resisted the urge to chew it, and instead opened her throat and let it ooze down.

  Cianna slammed the beaker down, and again fought with herself not to vomit. She leaned forward, pressing her hot, sweaty forehead to the cool stone of the pedestal, trying to will the nausea away. Her stomach churned painfully, and she groaned in discomfort. It was a close call, but in the end she won. As she straightened, she felt another awareness slip over her mind, and she saw images she had never seen before in her life. A childhood that wasn't hers, filled with lavish parties and decorative dolls. The scene changed, and she was aware of a completely different childhood, on the streets of the Ivory City when it was fresh and new, the Ivory Tower just being finished as she gazed upon the skyline, her eyes drifting south, where she knew the Necromancers’ Mosque was.

  “What's happening?” she asked, grasping at the pedestal for support against the vertigo the alien memories brought to her mind.

  “Turn right, take fifteen steps, there will be another pedestal.”

  Cianna crouched where she was, willing the room to stop spinning. Snippets of conversation were joining the memories flooding through her mind, as if the separate people she had memories of were joining together in conversation at the back of her mind.

  “Obey.”

  “Dear Goddess, give me a moment,” Cianna barked. She stood, leaning heavily on the pedestal. When she felt she was strong enough to walk, she shuffled to the right fifteen steps.

  “Eat,” Mama Brigit commanded. This time the voices and memories in Cianna's head took all of her focus away from the slimy balls on the plate before her. When she bit into on she barely registered that whatever it was popped and oozed a kind of jelly between her teeth.

  More voices, more memories. This one was a victim of rape, who hunted down her attackers after becoming a necromancer and visited upon them every plague she could think of, nearly wiping out the small town she had been raised in when the contagion she conjured caught and spread through the village.

  “Take five steps, again there will be a pedestal.”

  Ten more times she was commanded to move, and ten more times she alternately drank horrible fluids, or ate cold, rancid food, before the memories became too much.

  Her head felt on fire, and there was a continuous cacophony of conversation happening in her head. She saw images that weren't her own, memories of other lives that threatened to overwhelm her, pushing away what made her Cianna, and replacing all of her memories with memories of other people, other lives.

  She fell to her knees, and was only slightly aware of something being placed in front of her before she started vomiting violently. It felt like her very soul was being ripped out of her body through her mouth, every muscle commanded by a reaction to whatever toxic food she had been fed.

  And still the memories swirled, the knowledge of other lives bombarded her.

  When she felt her head was about to split she screamed out one word.

  “STOP!” and the voices fell silent. Within the fabric of her new, shared mind, she felt the tenuous thread of Cianna, and pulled her to the surface. This was a familiar life, this was something she knew, something she had experienced. She pulled her memories around her like a cloak, and pushed all the others away where they stayed.

  “A necromancer,” Mama Brigit said, helping Cianna to stand. Cianna leaned heavily on the loa as she was led to a chair. “Is so much more than a single person.”

  As she sat, lights around the room began to grow into existence until Cianna could see she was in a small chamber, a long table set before her with platters of real food, and mugs of real drink. Beside her was a large wooden bucket. In the left-hand corner stood a small wooden door.

  “What's that door?” Cianna asked.

  “That door leads to other temples for other necromancers from other worlds. You won't be going in there.”

  Cianna shook her head. There were enough oddities happening right now that she didn't need to think of alien necromancers.

  When she looked up, she noticed the walls. She didn't have to imagine the dead crammed into the small spaces of the walls as insulation anymore, because she could see them. The inside walls of the chamber were made of glass, allowing her to glimpse different bodies all mashed together in the small space, pressed painfully into the glass. Fluid and rotten meat hung from bones that mashed starkly white against the stained glass, all staring out at her.

  “Those are people who failed the test?” Cianna asked. She couldn't draw her attention away from the dead bodies in the walls, all in various states of decay.

  Mama Brigit took a drink from a clear goblet, then nodded as if they were discussing nothing more than the weather outside.

  Cianna looked back down at the bucket just to draw her mind away from the images.

  “What's the bucket for?” Cianna asked. She was still sick, her muscles weak, and her bones feeling like they were numb inside her skin.

  “That's for when you realize what you consumed,” Brigit said.

  Before she could help herself, Cianna looked up at the pedestals. On the first plate was a pile of rotting fingers and toes. Her stomach churned painfully, and she retched into the bucket.

&nbs
p; “In the customs of the necromancers, one must consume the flesh of those who came before in order to obtain their memories.”

  It sounded so clinical, but Cianna couldn't help but imagine what she had eaten, not to mention what in the realms all of those liquids were. Her stomach churned painfully, and she vomited again.

  “Yes, I assume you will be sick for some time, but at least not as sick as a human would be,” Mama Brigit said. “As I was saying before, a necromancer is so much more than one person. You are Cianna LaFaye in body, and retain the majority of her memories, but you also are now a repository for the souls of all the necromancers who came before you.”

  When her stomach stopped churning and she could finally breathe again, Cianna spoke.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you are only a body for the necromancer. You are no longer Cianna LaFaye, though you may still act like her and look like her. You are now the necromancer. There is only ever one, but that one necromancer is an embodiment of every necromancer that ever lived.”

  Cianna's head swam. She didn't want this. She was tired, and she was sick, and she tried not to think about what this meant, despite the colony of voices buzzing in the background of her mind relentlessly now. She wanted sleep, and she thought maybe this all wouldn't be so bad in the morning when she had time to rest and then look at it with fresh eyes.

  “Eating rotting meat is toxic,” Cianna said. “You poisoned me.”

  “It's toxic for humans. Normally the necromancy within them won't let them die from this ritual. But you aren't human in the least, Cianna. The only thing tying you to this plane is the way you were conceived. You are full angel birthed by another angel. Angels are only ever made by the Goddess, and not in the way humans are. By that, you are tied to the human plane.”

  It was something Cianna already knew, but at the same time, having never been around angels, and being raised with humans, made her feel like angels were something from stories, not anything an actual person saw, let alone was.

  “I'm an angel,” Cianna said. It didn't really sound right on her lips. She shook her head. She knew this. Why was it so hard to accept it?

  “But there's more,” Brigit said. “To each necromancer information is granted about some mystery in their life. So I want to tell you a story, the true story of the darkness rising in the west, and how your father died.”

  So Mama Brigit began to speak, and as she talked Cianna's eyes grew wider and wider in disbelief.

  That night she slept, and in the morning when she woke, it was to the constant buzz of other voices and other memories in her head. She started off again for Bahagresh, and during the two days it took her to traverse the path back to the capital city of the Realm of Fire, she came to control the voices and memories so they were little more than background thoughts that she could review when she wanted, but not something that disrupted her daily activity.

  Azra welcomed her as an old friend, and sent her by rojo to the Desert of the Trostly’n.

  “You're back!” Flora hugged her as she stepped from the cellar and into the protected desert. Around her colorful tents and joyful voices rose toward the red-domed wyrded barrier around them. The barrier didn’t stop the wind or sand from blowing through the tents, but it did give an odd sense of bended space around her. Cianna looked up and watched clouds pass overhead, magnified at the apex of the bubble, as if she were in a glass globe. As they passed to the west they became smaller and smaller, fading out of sight as they seemed to slip over the western edge of the sphere, toward the earth.

  Cianna nodded.

  “The others will be so happy to see you,” Flora said.

  “I can't stay. I have to head to the Guardian's Keep. They need me there,” Cianna told her, returning the old lady’s hug.

  “Right. We’ve been waiting for you, and we’re prepared to go with you, if the offer still stands,” Flora said.

  “It does,” Cianna agreed.

  In the morning the rojo was activated with the Guardian's Keep in the Realm of Earth in mind.

  The Guardian's Keep rose majestically on the horizon that night as they stopped to make camp. Angelica could see it, perched at the base of the Barrier Mountains and rising up along the face of the mountain like a bird perched on the side of a tree. It was made of steel, that much she remembered from classes with Grace, but from where she stood Angelica could tell that the craftsmanship of the chaos dwarves who built it made it more a work of art than a lumbering metal monstrosity.

  Towers and parapets glowed warmly in the setting sun, and even from their distance she could see the sun glittering happily off the windows. It belied the chill of the evening.

  The air was oddly warm for the time of year, given their location in the far north. But that didn’t make it pleasurable by any means. The warmth of the air melted snow, making it mushy and slushy beneath their feet, and made sleeping nearly impossible. All of the wet atmosphere only allowed what cold still clung to the air to sink into their bones.

  Angelica shivered and turned back to camp, tightening the hold on her cloak.

  “We’ll be there tomorrow,” Grace said, glancing up from where she leaned over Jovian’s face, checking his wound and Joya’s work. She nodded approvingly, even if her face was knitted with concern for Jovian. “It will be so nice to see my sisters once more.”

  There was a note in her voice that said that at more than one point on their voyage she hadn't expected to see any of her loved ones again.

  Rosalee handed Grace a mug of liquor they had procured from a burned-out town, and took the rabbit from her that Jovian had previously hunted and cleaned. Huddled in her fur cloak, Rosalee impaled the rabbit and set it to roasting over the fire.

  “It will be nice to be out of this weather,” Rosalee said.

  “My warming wyrd isn't enough for you?” Dalah asked, completing her circle around the camp. When the two ends of the circle met, the air warmed markedly.

  “It's nothing like a warm bed and a nice fire to make one feel at home, even if home is so far away,” Rosalee said.

  Angelica came to rest on a log beside Grace, and the old lady wrapped her in a motherly embrace. There was thanks in that embrace — Grace owed her life to Angelica and Jovian, and she showed it in her actions toward them, even if her stubbornness would never allow her to voice her gratitude.

  In the morning they made haste in clearing their campsite, and were on their way as the sun rose over the mountains in the east. When evening came it was with their feet landing their first steps on the path up the mountain and to the gates of the keep.

  Grace was recognized, and with a jovial shout, the guard opened the gates to let them through.

  Inside Angelica saw several smaller buildings gathered around the main road. Other streets led back to more and more buildings that were coming to life slowly. They looked like they were preparing for something, or was this was a small village at the base of the keep? Angelica didn't think that was right. This was a military forming against a threat.

  Suddenly the thought of safety seemed farther from her than the warm greeting she had wanted.

  The way Grace spoke to people as they passed made Angelica feel slightly uncomfortable, like she was among strangers who shouldn't be strangers because they had a mutual friend. She would smile and nod sheepishly as they went.

  As they rounded a corner and the full sight of the keep came into view, all thoughts of discomfort fled from her mind. The splendor of the keep from far away was nothing when they were up close.

  Standing at the base of it, the keep seemed to stretch up into eternity, each level climbing higher and resting further back as it clung to the side of the mountain. Stained glass windows added to the spectacle just as the knotwork carving around windows and doors did.

  Here and there she could see doors that in warmer weather would open upon balconies, but now that winter had set in, they were shut tight against the cold, and heavy drapes had been draw
n across them.

  There was a smaller courtyard, which stood open to the path. Grace strode through like she owned the place, and she waved to a smaller, short-haired woman who was just then walking from the large door of the keep.

  “Mag, so nice to see you,” Grace said in greeting. The woman named Mag smiled and bowed to Grace. They started talking, but Rose pushed past, eager to be in the warmth of the keep. The rest of them followed her, leaving Grace to her visitations.

  To the left of the doors was a stairway that disappeared around a bend to the right. Another stairway ascended out of sight to the right. Before them was a large sitting room with various doors off the side.

  Angelica stepped into the warmth offered by the entrance hall and looked around at the vaulted ceilings painted with scenes of epic angelic battles. The black and white floor was polished to enough of a shine to reflect the paintings above.

  She feared to speak, because the entrance hall was so quiet she thought for sure she would disturb someone.

  “So this is the Guardian's Keep,” Joya said. Angelica waited for her sister's voice to echo back at them, but it didn't. She relaxed.

  Other voices could be heard, coming from a distance but getting closer.

  Angelica and Jovian stepped out of the way, thinking someone was about to come through the front door. Angelica scowled at the muddy snow they had tracked in, but then went back to studying the paintings on the wall.

  The voices came near, and when a door in the hallway opened up, Angelica yelped.

  A dark-haired girl who looked startlingly like Joya stepped through the door.

  “Oh, the entrance hall. I don't know why I never knew there was a rojo in the basement…” her voice trailed off as she saw Angelica and her group.

  At the sight of Cianna, that second presence slipped through Angelica and Jovian's minds, and memories welled to the surface. Images of their Aunt Pharoh while in life. They knew from seeing their aunt, projected from the medallion, and before, when they called her Aramaiti, that this was her daughter, Cianna, their necromancer cousin.