PHWOOOOOOOOSH! A gust of red flames shot from Steamclaw’s mouth, drenching the Sea Demon’s flesh in a deadly heat. A horribly hot, sticky substance that burned like acid splattered on Gribly’s face and arms and chest. He flung his head and shoulders over Steamclaw’s side and threw up as a wave of nausea choked him. Disgusting! Demon fat! He thought.
For some reason, that set him laughing, and he was still chuckling when Steamclaw burnt its way into the Demon’s body.
~
The Sea Demon’s screech was so loud, and the shockwave of power that came out of it so great, that Lauro and Elia were both thrown to the ground again.
“Look at it!” the prince shuddered. “It’s clawing at its back as if a giant bee had just flown up and stung it! Look at those arms! It’s like they’re not attached to anything!”
“Working by themselves, you could say…” Elia agreed, in a quiet voice.
“Allfar! Look- it’s stopped moving… it’s just hanging there like it’s too tired to fight! The flames! It’s head is all in flames!”
Just then, Karmidigan rushed up beside them in a whirlwind of sleet and frost. “Look, my friends,” he smiled grimly, “The Demon is under attack from more than us! Someone has taken the battle to the inside!”
“Impossible!” Lauro nearly shouted.
“You’ve been saying that quite a lot today,” Elia observed wryly. That shut him up.
“I must strengthen our defense. Whoever and whatever has joined our cause, he must be aided. The fury of the Frost Striders will be a thing to sing of in days to come!” The burly nymph threw his head back and roared to the sky. Whiteness appeared in blotches on his face and grew to cover his whole body in seconds. In a quarter-minute he was in his Second Form, bounding away over the churning, icy earth.
“There’s a man if I ever saw a nymph worthy to be one,” muttered Lauro respectfully. Louder, he said, “I wonder who could have gotten to the Demon like that. I thought we were dead and gone, for sure.”
“I think I know, or could guess,” Elia replied, softly, but to him it looked like she hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She looked thoughtful… too thoughtful for a battle.
“Well, whoever he is, he’ll need help. I’m going up there.” Lauro braced himself for flight before a sudden memory stopped him. “Blast! Where’s my pike?”
~
Time did not exist; there was only slime and heat and pain and ugly horror.
It could have been a minute, it could have been a year. All Gribly knew was that at last Steamclaw had stopped and he was tumbling off its back onto the gummy, nasty floor of the tunnel the draik had burned into the Sea Demon’s flesh. He slumped there motionless for a minute, his palms and knees sinking deep into the ooze.
“MASTER. THE DEMON IS AWARE OF US. WE MUST MOVE QUICKLY.”
“Right…” he mumbled, spitting and trying to dislodge the awful taste in his mouth. Finally he looked up. “What next?” He didn’t bother standing; he wasn’t sure he could if he tried. In answer, Steamclaw let loose a final spurt of flame. It melted away the portion of the sludge directly in front of them, revealing a rounded surface that looked to be made of stone. “Oh.”
With an effort he found he could stand without wobbling too much. Stumbling forward, he pressed his hands against the rough hardness. It was stone after all, scored and burned deeply all over with various runes and symbols, none of which Gribly understood. In fact, where he ought to be frightened he felt only a strange sort of apathy. The whole battle seemed so unreal he had a difficult time training his focus on the task ahead. He only hoped he could still maintain his unlikely connection with the stone enough to stride it.
Grunting, he pushed his palms against the surface, willing it inward. Nothing.
“MASTER. TIME IS RUNNING OUT.”
The Sand Strider gritted his teeth. “Right, then. Let’s try something else.” His patience was running thin, and he felt more anger than fear. Stepping back, he pushed the cuffs of his heavy Reethe cloak up to his elbows. Then, with a cry, he leaped forward, bringing his fists into a double-strike on the stone’s surface. Before, he had been trying to mold the element to his will. Now that it had failed, his only thought was to break the power that held the stone together with a greater power of his own.
His fists struck the stone with tremendous force, bloodying his knuckles and cracking something in his right hand. But the move worked: thin cracks spider-webbed out from beneath his fists and rippled outward like a miniature earthquake. The stone began to flake and peel like dead skin on a scaly reptile.
Gribly stepped back. “That’s all? Nothing else?”
Suddenly the cracks were lit from within with a fiery light. The stone shuddered, shook, and split right down the middle.
“That’s better,” he huffed, but his voice shook. Bloody light poured from the crack and bathed him in its murderous glow. Yet even so, the interior of the stone seemed dark and forbidding, unlit by its own luminance.
The tunnel shuddered as the Sea Demon tried to shake them out.
“GO! ENTER THE SHELL! THE DARK POWER IS HOUSED WITHIN!”
“Do I have to?” he wheezed, the full extent of what he was about to do threatening to choke him. I can’t know what’s in there… It’ll probably kill me, or drive me mad! Steamclaw turned a bloodshot eye on him. “All right, all right… I’m going.”
With a deep breath, the reluctant hero dove into the darkness.
~
“Found it!” Lauro exclaimed, dislodging his weapon from under a fallen block of ice. “Now I can-”
“Hail!” called an unsteady, high-pitched voice behind him. “Lord Prince!”
“What?!?” he yelled, “Who is it now… oh…” he wheeled on the interloper, only to find himself staring at a scrawny old nymph with ridiculously large ears and stringy gray hair, dressed in the most voluminous blue robes he had ever seen on anyone. A sash around his thin body bore the rune of the clerics, and he gripped a polished white staff in his hand with a lit candle affixed to the top. The flame was the color of sapphire, unwavering and bright.
“Are you the Cleric of Mythigrad?” asked Elia breathlessly as she ran up.
“Lithric is my name,” the nymph nodded, gripping his staff in both hands for support as the ground heaved. “The care of this Shrine is my task in life, as is the Healing of Ills and the Binding of Wounds. And I would have you know your peril!”
Excitable old goblin, isn’t he? Lauro thought. “Peril, good Cleric?”
“Peril! Yes! You must not go up to the Dark Power, Lord Prince!”
“Why not? I need to help whoever’s up there fighting the Demon. And how do you know my title?”
The cleric ignored the second question, and his answer to the first was vague. “The One who fights Inside is not your concern. His fight is his fight Alone: A battle of the Mind and Soul. He will have all the Aid he requires. A destiny is on him. A Prophesy is his, and he is… a Prophet!” During the speech, the cleric’s eyes had drifted shut. Now they shot open, in alarm or excitement.
“No…” Lauro shook his head. “You can’t mean Gribly… He’s not…”
“What?” Elia glared at him. “Not what? A hero?”
“Well…” Lauro bit his lip. It was exactly what he’d been thinking. “Well, he’s not a warrior… he’s not very strong… and… and he’s a thief! He didn’t want to help me when I met him… and he’s only helping you because he’s smitten with you!”
“He is not!” Elia retorted, but her face was uncharacteristically red.
Wind Strider and Wave Strider stood face to face, inches apart, smoldering eyes locked on each other. Lauro felt a not-uncommon emotion flooding his chest: envy. He couldn’t deny he was furious at Elia for defending Gribly, and he also knew that deep down… he was jealous of them both. Gribly had never known his parents, and Elia… she had known and loved them with all her heart, before they’d died. Either choice was better than his: a mother dead from the pain he�
�d caused her in birth, and a father who had rejected him.
“Silence!” groaned Cleric Lithric, standing nearby with a sorrowful expression. He raised his staff. “It is not for you, Prince, or you, Lady, to determine who is heroic in this world. No, that would be too deep a task even for me, old as I am. All that you or I can decide is who we shall follow, and what we shall do with our time. And at the moment… there is nothing for us all to do, but wait. The die is cast; the game is begun. This is but an early move. Wait, and see how it will be determined. In the meantime, Be Silent!”
His voice grew deeper with each syllable. Lauro dropped his gaze from Elia’s eyes and looked away. What he saw shocked him: the old nymph was growing taller, brighter, and whiter with each passing second! He was, in fact, Changing. For some reason it had not occurred to the prince as something a cleric would do; now it stunned him and silenced him better than any words could have.
At the end of the Change, Cleric Lithric stood seven feet tall, slim and shimmering in a frosty coat of his snow-like second form. He looked stately and regal, so totally unlike his former appearance that Lauro almost gasped.
“Lay aside your disagreement, Young Ones,” the snow nymph advised solemnly. His voice was deep and melodious, like the voice of the earth or great mountains themselves. It sounded again, like a bronze gong in a deep cave of the earth. “I must meditate, and cast my thought towards the heart of the battle. For good or evil, the outcome of this battle will mean much for the cause of the Aura, and the One Whom they serve.”
“Waiting…” Lauro shook his head and grumbled sullenly to himself. “There are few things in life I despise more…”
Chapter Eighteen: Names in the Nothing
Shadow, all-consuming and all-penetrating. It gnawed at the boy’s mind like a corruptive worm. He no longer knew his name or who he was. He knew only one thing, and that was why he had come: to kill the Demon.
SO, PROPHET. YOU HAVE COME. YOU WERE WARNED. NOW YOU WILL PAY.
That voice! It was the Demon, wasn’t it? He could not see where it came from. There were no distances here, no shapes or hues, no smelling or seeing or tasting or touching. The Demon had called him Prophet, hadn’t it? Fine then… a prophet he would be.
-I will not fail, Demon. I will send you back to the underworld. I will banish you to the depths of Kerbus where you are utterly powerless to harm another innocent being… ever again. This is my prophesy.
The Demon did not immediately respond. Instead, the suffocating hostility of its presence receded, and Gribly found himself suddenly aware.
Aware of air around him, and earth under him.
Aware of sight returning, and hearing, and smell. The air smelled dead. The earth felt hard and polished. Like stone. He heard the heaviness in the air and smelled the cloying odor of decay.
The nothingness in his eyes turned to deep Black, then faded to a dark Gray. It grew lighter and thinner every second, until at last a new and terrifying world rushed in on him in a single moment.
The sky was dark and cloudy overhead. Lightning flashed higher up and unseen, but the sky remained unbroken in its shroud. There was no wind.
All around, farther than the eye could see, the land was completely gray, dark and pitted with slag and craters full of waste. Smoke billowed up in fuming, milky-white spires here and there, but there was no other break in the darkness.
The prophet shuffled his foot, and sand moved beneath it. He looked up, saw where he was, and turned in a circle to see it all.
He stood in the middle of a paved stone circle, ringed with broken pillars and ruined walls, shattered arches and cracked, headless stone statues. It reminded the prophet of somewhere he had been, someplace he had seen and walked in the midst of… He couldn’t remember where.
-I will slay you for this reason only, Demon. You’ve taken away my Inside. You’ve washed my mind clean of its memory.
The Demon spoke, and this time its voice had a source. It came from behind him. YOU ARE A FOOL, PROPHET. THIS IS YOUR INSIDE. IT IS MINE. IT IS THE INSIDE. THERE IS NO OTHER. THIS IS MIND. THIS IS SOUL. THIS IS SPIRIT.
-No. I will not believe it. There is more, and I will find it when I kill you.
The prophet turned, and faced the Demon. It had materialized near him as if it had always been there, proud and tall, with a face both proud and cruel. It had the face of a young man, but it its features were twisted into a shape they did not belong in, as if the Dark Power within was using them for its purpose, and then would discard them… and they knew it.
The prophet felt he should know that face. It was familiar, even more so than the ruins around him. Its dulled, light-colored hair, its sunken eyes…
Then the prophet knew. It was him. It was his face.
-What more can you steal from me, Demon? I will destroy you!
YOU WILL NOT. I WILL SUCK YOUR SPIRIT DRY AND CHAIN IT TO MY WILL AS I HAVE DONE TO THIS ONE BEFORE YOU.
The Demon and the prophet stood face to face, inches from each other, fists clenched at their sides. The prophet held back his surprise. The one before him? Was this some other prophet the Demon had taken control of? Some poor soul whose face was the same as his own? The notion nagged at some forgotten corner of his mind and would not go away. This was important, even vital- he just knew it! But there was no way to know how, or why.
Unless he defeated the Demon. Unless he chained it, and made it tell him all it knew.
-Go to the doom prepared for you, Demon. I will break you. This I prophesy!
I WILL NOT!
The Powers clashed, one Light, one Dark. The prophet struck at his foe, and the Demon struck back. They caught each other’s blows and renewed their attacks faster than the prophet had thought could be done, calling out as they fought.
-It is my lot to say what the future brings, Demon! It brings your death!
YOU ARE AS USELESS AS YOUR GODS, FOOL! NO MORTAL CAN CHALLENGE ME AND LIVE! YOU WILL BE DAMNED AS DARKLY AS I HAVE BEEN!
-You are nothing, Demon. I will make it your name: you are Nothing, and the power in me is Everything! There are no gods! I serve… I serve…
YOU SERVE A FALSE HOPE. YOU SERVE WEAK, HELPLESS ANGELS ON BROKEN WINGS.
-No! I know Whom I serve! I serve the Aura! I serve the One who sent them! I serve the One Who made Mortal and Immortal alike!
The prophet kicked out at the Demon he had named Nothing. The blow sent his enemy reeling, and he was on him in less than time, striking again and again, with vengeance burning in his heart. Nothing was quick to retaliate. Fire blazed on his palms and in his eyes; he thrust his fists into the prophet’s stomach, throwing him back roughly and crushing his breath from his lungs.
He landed on his back at the edge of the circle. Stone and sand bit into his shoulders, and a biting pain ate at his body. For a reason he could not fathom, the ground under him felt cool and comforting against that burning pain.
THE UNNAMEABLE ONES WILL NOT HELP YOU HERE. YOU ARE LOST, PROPHET. LOST FOREVER. I WILL KILL YOUR BODY AND YOUR SPIRIT. GIVE UP. YOU ARE LOST.
Nothing rushed across the space, wringing his arms and chanting in a dark, violent tongue beyond comprehension. A fire blazed up on the prophet’s chest, spreading to his limbs and engulfing him in deadly agony. He screamed as Nothing poured his power and malice into the fight.
He screamed again and again as Nothing reached him and began to kick him; in the side, in the head, in the arms, and all over. Everywhere Nothing’s boot hit, new pain and new fire blossomed like a ghastly flower that strangled all it touched.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW, PROPHET? WHERE ARE THE ONES YOU THOUGHT WERE AT YOUR SIDE? WHERE HAVE THEY GONE? THEY HAVE ABANDONED YOU, FOOL, AND NOW YOU WILL DIE!
There was no way to fight back. Nothing was right, and he was going to die.
-Aura! Aura! the prophet called, writhing and shuddering on the hard ground.
Without knowing why he thought of it, or why it came to his mind at his time of greatest need, the prophet remembe
red a name- a name that, perhaps, was worth more than Nothing. And without knowing why he said it, the prophet screamed the named into the windless air.
-Traveller! Traveller! Viator! Succurye fen isdristye!
They were strange words, and meant no more to him than the curses of Nothing. And yet…
“My child.” It was the first real voice in this nothingness. These were first two words that fell on his ears instead of his mind. The burning in him melted away like ice in the warm summer sun.
Winter Warrior (Song of the Aura, Book Two) Page 14
