The Mountains Rise

by Michael G. Manning

  “Hello?” he asked uncertainly, but she ignored his call.

  She was naked, just as almost everyone seemed to be, aside from the wardens and the forest gods, and she couldn’t have been much older than eleven or twelve years of age. Her chest was still flat, and her hips had hardly any curve to them. She had no shield around her, but he could see that she possessed a strong glow. What caught his attention though, was her hair. It was bright red, and while she had cut it short, he couldn’t help but be reminded of Kate.

  The circular edge of the field was marked at four points by long poles rising from the wall that surrounded it. At the end of each pole was a wooden sphere that glowed with visible light. They were blue when Daniel entered, but they shifted to a red hue now.

  A loud noise, like a musical chime sounded in his ears as they shifted color. The girl on the opposite side from him promptly vanished.

  “What the hell?” he blurted out before closing his mouth. One second she had stood there, clear to him with both his eyes and his ‘other’ sense, and then she had completely disappeared. There was no sign of her at all. It was as if she had ceased to exist.

  He waited, completely baffled and not knowing what to do, or what was expected of him. A minute later she reappeared briefly, flickering in and out of existence only ten yards away. His mind never felt her—only his eyes registered her momentary presence there. Bewildered, he turned to face the direction that he had seen her.

  She appeared again, but this time she was directly behind him, and it was his mind that perceived her rather than his eyes. He saw her aura surge, and a flash of power shot forth from her, passing through his lower back and emerging from his stomach. He felt almost nothing, other than a strange stinging sensation. Glancing down he saw blood running from a small hole in his abdomen.

  She stabbed me! His mind was slow to register, but he could feel the pain in his lower back and belly beginning to grow. He staggered sideways just as she reappeared and sent another pulse of power through the space where he had just been standing. She vanished before he could react.

  “She stabbed me!” he yelled into the air, hoping someone would hear him. He knew this couldn’t be correct. Daniel wasn’t sure if the word ‘stabbed’ was the proper one to use, since she hadn’t had a knife, but he didn’t have time to find a better term.

  There was no response from whoever might be watching, but Daniel thought he could hear the sound of laughter.

  The red-head popped into existence again, this time on his left side. She sent a tiny burst of power into him again, piercing the thigh of his left leg. He noted that it was only with his mind that he could see her appear. She remained thoroughly invisible to his eyes. During her first appearance, before she had stabbed him, it had been the reverse.

  She isn’t vanishing, she’s making herself invisible somehow, he observed. She can make herself appear either to the eyes or the mind, selectively.

  His leg collapsed under him, and he felt her next attack pass through the air where his head had been. That would have been the final blow.

  But she can’t tell where I am when she’s completely invisible; otherwise I’d be dead already. He had a feeling that she reappeared to his mind because in order to use her power to attack, she had to become visible to whatever strange power it was that they used. Her first appearance had been to gauge the distance, to see if he had moved. The next attack will be right here, since she spotted me when she missed a second ago.

  Rolling madly, he felt his body strike something and the girl appeared suddenly. By chance he had rolled directly into her legs as she approached for her next attack. He was more than twice her size, and his bulk knocked her from her feet. More scared than anything, he grabbed her quickly, wrestling himself on top of her as she struggled to get away, flickering in and out of visibility.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he yelled at her as he got a firm grip on her shoulders.

  Abandoning her attempt at invisibility the girl snarled at him, sending another pulse of power through his chest. Searing pain ripped through him, and Daniel found it difficult to breathe, it felt as though he were drowning.

  Desperately he clutched at her neck, while trying to bring his own power to bear on her aura. He didn’t bother with soothing; he already suspected he might be dying. Instead, he clawed at her mentally as if he was trying to tear her mind apart.

  She fought his efforts, tightening her inner-self into a tight ball, deflecting his clumsy attacks. The only good thing about it was that she was no longer able to send any more piercing bursts of power through him.

  Tearing wildly at her aura to force her to keep her defenses up he fought her physically at the same time. She was tiny compared to him, and he had her completely pinned under his body. She bit and raked at his skin with her nails, but she had no hope of getting free. Squeezing his hands tightly around her throat, he fought mentally to keep her occupied until lack of air could do its work upon her.

  The girl’s face turned a shocking shade of purple and her eyes bulged, shedding tears of pain and fear. They were a hazel-green, more subdued than Kate’s had been, but similar enough that Daniel couldn’t help but be reminded of her.

  At last she stopped struggling, her arms going weak, and her tongue hanging grotesquely from her mouth. Daniel released her then, thinking to let her have air before she died, but once he withdrew his hands he could see that it was too late. Her windpipe had collapsed under the force of his grip. His mind watched helplessly while she turned from blue to purple, and her heart faltered, stuttering to a slow halt in her chest.

  Kneeling beside her, he began retching, but his stomach wasn’t full enough to bring anything up. Tears ran from his eyes, but he didn’t sob. His body was too tired for that. A numbness had stolen over him, and examining the ground nearby, he realized that it was covered in blood—his blood. He was bleeding slowly from his stomach, more rapidly from his leg, and—he couldn’t tell about his chest. One lung was full of blood already, and he gurgled when he tried to fill the other lung with air.

  He collapsed onto the dry, sandy ground.

  Chapter 18

  “He killed her?” asked Moira, shocked.

  “Yes,” I replied sadly. “If he hadn’t, she would have killed him.”

  “But why? It doesn’t make sense, she didn’t even know him.”

  “It didn’t make sense from his perspective,” I agreed, “and it took a long while before he began to understand what was really going on.” From the corner of my eye I could see Lynarralla watching my response carefully.

  Matthew broke in, “I’d rather know now, so we don’t have to be confused while you tell us all this stuff.”

  I addressed Lynarralla, “Do you know much about that time period?”

  “A little,” the She’Har girl admitted. “From my creation, I was given knowledge of language and spellweaving, but a rough outline of our history is in my mind as well.”

  “I’ll color it in for you,” I told her. “They were keeping the humans as slaves, making them fight for the She’Har’s entertainment. The circle he was standing in was a training arena.”

  “But you said they were all wizards,” noted Matthew.

  I nodded.

  “Couldn’t they do something? Break free, fight back, escape—anything but go along with it! That girl sounded like she was a Prathion. She could have escaped no matter what,” observed Matthew.

  “Remember the necklace around Daniel’s neck?” I reminded. “They all wore one, and there was no escape while that thing was on them.”

  “What was it?” asked Moira.

  “Essentially a slave collar, but it kept them from running. It had other functions as well, which I’ll explain as we get to them. More importantly,” I said, focusing on Matthew, “You’re right, the girl was a Prathion, but they weren’t as we know them now. She was little more than an animal.”

  “You said she was human,” noted Lynarralla.

  The iro
ny made me laugh. “That you should point that out is perfectly natural now, but your mother was educated differently, and everything she saw of humans then, did nothing to make them appear as much more than animals to her. The humans were raised in captivity, without parents to care for them. They received no love, no education, almost no contact with each other. By the time they reached the age of twelve, when they began to fight, their minds were stunted. Isolation made them violent, aggressive, and ultimately, stupid.”

  “That’s horrible,” declared Moira.

  “It was,” I said slowly. “Let me get back to the story, and you’ll start to see just how awful it could be…

  ***

  Kate stared at him with sad eyes, “Why Daniel? I loved you!”

  He tried to explain to her, but his mouth wouldn’t work. Instead he tried to hold her, but rather than an embrace, he found himself throttling her. She died beneath him, her face locked into a stare of accusation.

  Daniel awoke in the same small room that he had been in before. There was a bowl of soup on the table. It appeared that the sound of the woman leaving after delivering it was what had awoken him. Sitting up, he looked around.

  I should be dead.

  He quickly examined his body, looking for the holes that the girl had created. They were gone, with only silver scars left behind as a reminder. Taking a deep breath, he could feel that his lungs were clear. Curious, he turned his special vision inward, examining himself from the inside. It was something that he had never thought to do before.

  The confusion of organs and tissues he discovered within were a mystery to him, although he was able to identify and name many of them, because of his occasional experience butchering animals for meat. He found numerous places within where his body had been pierced, his lungs, liver, one kidney, the intestines, they all bore signs much like his outer skin. The girl’s attack had damaged them, and somehow they had been fixed.

  He had pondered that mystery for a while when the door opened again.

  A warden stood in the doorway. “Come,” he motioned without any further explanation.

  Having learned his lesson before, Daniel came quickly, without question or hesitation. He followed the man to the edge of the ‘city’ and then into the forest. They walked for almost an hour before arriving at the base of what apparently was the correct tree. The warden walked easily up the side of it.

  “Climb,” commanded the other man.

  Daniel watched him carefully as he walked. Trying to figure out how he managed it the way that he did. He could see that the man was using his power to adhere to the surface with his feet, but he didn’t seem to be straining to maintain his horizontal posture. It was as if he had somehow lightened his body, so that it was easy to maintain his strange position without injuring his feet.

  Moving as quickly as he could, he followed the man on all fours, crawling up the side of the tree.

  When they stopped, it was at a platform similar to the one he had been on before. He couldn’t be certain how long ago that had been. Keeping track of the days was becoming difficult, especially considering his bouts of unconsciousness.

  Two forest gods stood upon it, and he knew both of them. One was the silver-haired woman whom he had first met, and the other was the black-skinned man who had taken him to the strange city.

  The man said something in their strange language and then turned to Daniel, speaking to him in Barion, “There you are. Come closer and Lyralliantha will give you your name.”

  “Lyrallialla-lolly what?” asked Daniel. Did he mean the other god?

  The man smiled, “Our names are difficult for you, but I didn’t realize that you didn’t know the name of your master. This is Lyralliantha, and she is, in your tongue, your sponsor, or perhaps owner is a better term.”

  Daniel already knew that he was a slave, so the explanation didn’t shock him, but it still burned. “Lyral-ianth-a,” he said slowly, practicing the syllables.

  “That is correct,” said the man. “You must always kneel when you are before your master.”

  Daniel did so.

  “My name, is Thillmarius, of the Prathion Grove,” continued the male god.

  Daniel filed the name away carefully. “What is a ‘grove’?” He knew the term, but it made little sense the way the man had used it.

  Annoyed with the questions, Thillmarius waved his hands, “Enough for now, wildling. You are here for a name, since you won your first battle.”

  Battle? Is he referring to the little girl I killed?

  To describe to what had happened to him, as a ‘battle’, brought his anger to the foreground. “I already have a name,” he told them.

  “Nonsense, wildling,” declared Thillmarius. “Humans get their first name once they’ve survived a trial.” He spoke to Lyralliantha then, using their language.

  After a moment she replied, saying only one word, “Tyrion.”

  “What?” asked Daniel, uncertain.

  “She has given you your name,” said Thillmarius. “You are Tyrion from this point forward.”

  “My name is Daniel. Tell her that,” he replied. “If you want to know my name, you should ask—it’s Daniel!”

  Lyralliantha watched him with curious eyes. She couldn’t understand anything he said, but she knew that the human was upset about something.

  Thillmarius glanced at the warden, “Take him back. Educate him until he remembers his name properly.”

  “Yes, master,” said the other man.

  The warden led him back, but as soon as they reached the edge of the forest, Daniel took the initiative. Without giving any warning, he lashed out at the other man, sending a powerful burst of energy in his direction. He tried to mimic what the girl he had killed had done, creating an ultra-slim, highly focused lance of power, but not having tried it before, his results were much sloppier. Instead, his attack wound up being more like a battering ram and though it was still somewhat effective, it failed to pierce the warden’s shield.

  The man was thrown bodily into the air, rocketing backward to strike the base of one of the god-trees. He was mostly unharmed though, except for his dignity. Standing back up, he glared angrily at Daniel, “You’re going to regr…”

  Daniel didn’t give him a chance to finish his threat, lashing out at him again with a bludgeoning wave of force. The warden vanished before it struck.

  Can all of them become invisible like that? he wondered, but then his senses registered the other’s presence behind him.

  A line of burning pain raced across his back as the warden’s whip struck, erasing his thoughts. Screaming in frustration, Daniel leapt forward trying to escape the man’s reach but he was beside him again, and another line of fire burned across his legs. Collapsing to the ground, Daniel struggled to focus long enough to target his tormentor, but the whip destroyed his concentration. Soon he was reduced to a gibbering mass of pain, huddling on the ground, unable to escape the warden’s ceaseless wrath.

  Chapter 19

  Daniel awoke again in the small room. He was uninjured, and the whip had left no marks on him, much like the first time they had used it on him.

  “This is getting to be a bad habit,” he remarked to himself. I need to learn how to make those shields, he thought.

  With an endless day in front of him and no one to talk to, he began to practice. His first efforts were amorphous, sometimes covering him and at other times missing parts of his body. One thing he noticed quickly was the fact that physical objects were easier for him to create a shield around than an empty space, even if the object also included an empty space.

  Trying to create a spherical shield in the air in front of him was more difficult than creating a rectangular shield that followed the boundaries of his bedframe. He wasn’t sure why, but it was.

  By the second day he was able to create fairly reliable shapes in the middle of his room, but they weren’t particularly strong. He experimented by making cubes and pyramids, arranging them like buildings
on the dirt floor of his room. It got progressively more difficult the more separate objects he tried to maintain at once and more so if they were of differing shapes and sizes.

  It’s a matter of imagination, he realized. I have to train my mind to visualize these things. The better I get at that, the better my control will be.

  He tried creating a small city, raising small cubes of different heights and widths on the floor. Unfortunately he didn’t get very far, and somewhere around the fifth or sixth building, his construction fell apart. Frustrated he drew the outlines of the buildings on the dirt floor using his finger.

  “I want a big one here, a smaller one here, a pyramid there, a dome here,” he talked to himself as he drew, thinking about what he wanted to create. He stopped with a collection of fourteen outlines on the ground. “But I can’t seem to get past six…”

  On impulse he tried to create them all at once and he was surprised when they sprang easily into existence, just as he had imagined them. The shapes were well formed, and he could tell they were more solid than his previous efforts.

  What the hell?

  He released them and tried again. It was just as easy the second time. Curious he let them go and erased the lines he had drawn in the dirt and then he tried again, this time the shapes flickered and wobbled before collapsing. He couldn’t maintain them all. He drew a new set of lines, making a total of twenty shapes this time. They appeared easily when he put forth the energy.

  “Somehow the lines make visualizing it easier,” he observed. “Which probably explains why putting a shield around the bedframe was easier too.” The shape of the well-known object had served to reinforce his mental image.

  He practiced for the rest of the day, making shields that encased his body and others that formed more unusual shapes in the air. Even without creating lines in the dirt it was getting easier as his mind got more used to the task.

  By the fourth day, he was creating objects and attacking them at the same time. He would visualize a floating sphere and then try to recreate the focused lance of power that the girl had used against him. Once he got used to doing the two very dissimilar tasks at the same time it was easy, and he could pop the sphere every time.