The Kingdom of Eternal Sorrow (The Golden Mage Book 1)

by C. G. Garcia

  This is a trap, his mind screamed to him. Somehow Roderick knew we had discovered his plans. His attempt to take Idona is at most, half-hearted. That isn’t like him. He wanted us here.

  The longer he chewed on those thoughts, the more he was certain they had indeed fallen prey to one of Roderick’s traps. The dark-mage wanted them to come here, and he had a pretty good idea why.

  He’s after me specifically, Aidric thought flatly. The bastard’s making good on his last threat to me. He knew I would come. How could I not? The bloody demon hasn’t even the courage to face me himself. Instead, he sends his minions to murder the innocent just to draw my attention!

  Aidric could feel the anger building within him, fueling his hatred for Lamia’s long-time enemy. He could feel the power within him increasing with his rising fury until he shook with the intensity of it. His body began to glow more brilliantly with the added energy of his anger until he was nothing more than a being of pulsating light.

  The dyani swarm immediately stopped their attack, and they edged back, swirling amongst each other in chaotic patterns that reflected their agitation. The dyani swarm that had been attacking the village quickly lost interest in their human targets when they caught sight of Aidric’s glowing form. They immediately joined the swarm that cautiously circled Aidric, hungry for the power of hate that emanated from him but not able to approach because of his shields and the light of the Mage-field’s energy.

  Enveloped with more power than he usually could channel safely, Aidric knew that he had to cast the power away quickly or the magical energies would soon consume him. He was already beginning to feel transparent, as if he was indeed a being of light and air.

  Aided with the energy of his fury, he would be able to cast a spell that he seldom had enough power to attempt. He was going to cast the spell of implosion onto the swarm, causing the magical energies all around the beasts to collapse into a point of singularity, thus crushing the entire swarm within the blink of an eye. Whatever, if anything, was lucky enough to escape the pull of the energy would instead be obliterated in the proceeding explosion when the singularity reverted.

  “Keldan! Aren!” he sent to the twins, grateful that their natural bond to one another allowed him to thought-speak them together without having to broad-send. All he needed now was for one of Roderick’s mages who was a stronger thought-speaker than he to catch wind of what he was about to do. “I need your help! This attack is a trap, and I suspect it was intended for me and any other mage he could get his hands on. I’m about to rid us of this dyani swarm.”

  “Seni help us all,” Keldan sent back in alarm, “Aidric, you aren’t going to cast—”

  “I have no choice,” Aidric said flatly. “We ran out of options a long time ago. Warn my troops. Warn General Caith. Make damned certain that every one of them is tightly shielded with as many shields as possible! The backlash of the explosion—”

  Aidric had no need to finish. He still had nightmares because of the last time he had cast the implosion spell. No one but Seni, Himself, could predict the force of the final explosion. Sometimes it covered a radius of a few hundred handspans—and sometimes it was a few hundred spans.

  Last time it had been a hundred spans.

  “I don’t need to tell either of you how worthless the spell will leave me. Keldan, I place command of the magical troops in your hands. The moment the dyani are obliterated, concentrate your efforts on destroying Roderick’s mages—if any survive the Reversal. Relay my message to the other mages. General Caith’s men will take care of any Mihran troops still standing. I doubt there will be any.”

  “We’re on it,” came the mingled, uneasy, reply. “Seni’s luck to us all.”

  Anger and light thundering throughout the channels in his body, Aidric cast the power before him to encircle the dyani in a shield of magic that could not be penetrated.

  The moment the shield was in place, Aidric shouted his incantation up into the darkened sky as if shouting his defiance, “Di akanai ta lansou ti reist ta aena solvian!” I command thou life and light combine and fold!

  The moment the ancient words roared from his throat, the circle of power collapsed within itself in a flash of blinding, sapphire light and vanished into a point Aidric could not see, stretching thin what was material of the dyani swarm until the hellspawn fell into the abyss of the singularity. In almost the same instant, an explosion of power sounded out into the half-beat of silence after the dyani disappeared. Aidric instinctually shielded his eyes with an arm and closed them tightly the instant the world became a blinding inferno of white light.

  Aidric felt himself collapse onto his knees hard as the backlash of power engulfed him, ripping mercilessly into his many shields, destroying the outermost as easily as the swipe of a snowcat’s great claws shredding a piece of sholkie cloth. A deafening, high-pitched roar flooded his ears painfully. He couldn’t even hear himself scream. He had become the light—

  Silence.

  The silence was so sudden and profound that it too, like the roar before it, was painful to his ears. Aidric’s hands were firmly pressed over his ears. He hadn’t realized that he had raised them.

  Slowly, he lowered them until his arms hung loosely at his side, tentatively raised his head, and opened tear-blurred eyes. The sight that greeted him was his bloodstained hands. He felt weak and oddly transparent as though the night air was flowing directly through his body. Blood began to trickle from his nose at an alarming rate. He wiped at the warm fluid bemusedly as if he was merely swatting at an annoying insect.

  Aidric grimaced as he tried to refocus his eyes in the surrounding darkness after staring into the brilliance of the power he had contained, afraid of what he was about to see. Numbly, he saw that he stood a few handspans from the outer edges of a deep crater. The earth surrounding the point of singularity he had created had been destroyed down to the layer of bedrock deep below.

  Through a haze of shock, Aidric realized that only the weakest energy from the blast had reached him. He knew with utmost certainty that it was the only reason he was still alive. Even still, the plant life around him had been scorched down to the dark earth. Only a small patch of grass and tiny wildflowers where he stood had been spared by virtue of his shields. The blast had miraculously only reached a radius of about a couple hundred handspans. The destruction hadn’t even reached the battlefield.

  He would have wept had he been able, but the shock had stilled his emotions. Seni had indeed been watching over his children tonight.

  Aidric was vaguely aware of the mage battle that was waging on around him and that a couple of the shields he had placed around himself earlier to ward off the dyani were still soundly in place. The clang of metal on metal rang out into the night, and he heard the resonance of distant melodies that signaled that the twins were performing bardic magic. However, all of that seemed so far away now.

  He had to rise. His duty was not yet finished. Aidric swayed dizzily as he tried to climb to his feet again, driven with the intent to aid his comrades in the battle, and to his chagrin, he pitched forward onto his knees once again.

  Aidius, I’m worse off than I had anticipated, he thought irritably, grunting in pain. Damn it! I do not need this right now! Just concentrate you fool! It’s the shock—concentrate on dispersing it out of your body—

  “Aidric! Look out! Behind you!” he suddenly heard Allison’s mind-voice shout frantically within his mind.

  Aidric didn’t have time to wonder how she had managed to reach him at such a great distance because almost in the same beat as his weakened body reflexively rose into action, his magical defenses screamed out “danger!” into every nerve in his body.

  He gathered what power he had left within himself, too weak to draw from the Mage-field, whirled around, and released it as a dagger of concentrated power without waiting to see who or what it was that he faced.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Allison woke to the sensation that someone had given her
an electrical shock. Her body convulsed painfully, trapped within a tightly enclosed barrier. A cry was wrenched from her throat. She instinctively clutched the blankets spread over her tightly in her fists, her hands feeling as though they moved through the resistance of water, until the spasms in her muscles ceased.

  Wide-eyed, she stared at all the strange faces surrounding her bed and swallowed fearfully.

  “What—who—” she began before the memory of what she had just witnessed came flooding back to her. “Aidric!” she shrieked and immediately tried to rise from her bed.

  To her surprise, Allison found that none of her limbs seemed to be obeying her. The paralysis spell, she thought absently, her mind still hazy from sleep and panic. But who? And why? It was a moment before her befuddled mind registered the significance of the small crowd gathered in her room.

  “Let me up!” she demanded as she struggled against the invisible bounds. “I have to warn him!”

  “Allison, please—stop fighting us!” she heard a familiar voice plead, tense with exertion.

  That voice was as effective as a hard slap to the face, and Allison finally came fully awake, stopping her struggles against the invisible bonds set on her body.

  “Raya?” she asked hesitantly, blinking her eyes in confusion. “What’s going on? Why did someone cast the paralysis spell over me?”

  The young girl moved into her field of vision, and Allison gasped when she saw her appearance. Raya’s face was drawn and haggard, her forehead glistening with sweat. She glanced around at the rest of those present in the room and felt the blood leave her face when she saw them in similar conditions as Raya.

  “You were caught in the throes of a Foresight dream,” Raya explained wearily. “At least we think it was a Foresight dream.”

  “Think? You’re not sure?” Allison asked incredulously.

  “No,” Raya replied unhappily. “Nothing like this has ever happened. We couldn’t wake you. I came in here to check on you, and your entire body was glowing with Mage-field energy. I don’t know why none of us sensed the power. When I tried to touch you to wake you, the energy struck out at me and bloody well flung me across the entire room! That should have never happened. No one should be able to wield the power of the Mage-field without first Bonding your life-energies to it! Yet, I swear on everything that I hold sacred that the power you used was drawn from our own Mage-field!”

  For the first time, Raya looked at her in fear, and that fear was like a knife in her heart. Allison despairingly closed her eyes so she no longer had to look at the fear on the face of her friend, a fear that only too clearly reminded her of the monster that she was in the eyes of these people. She viciously clamped down on the tears that swelled in her eyes, denying herself even that release in which she could find a bit of solace.

  My God—what the hell have I become?

  “The others,” Allison said quietly without emotion, still keeping her eyes shut to the world, “they thought I would kill you—that’s why they cast the paralysis spell over me.”

  Only then did she open her eyes to look at Raya and was puzzled when she saw Raya’s expression contorted with conflicting emotions. The silence in the room was profound—you could have heard a feather brush the floor—and the air was so saturated with tension that it left a foul taste in the back of her mouth.

  “Is that what you think of us—of me?” Raya finally demanded as her face finally settled on a look of dismay. “That you believe us to fear that which is only a shadow of ourselves? If that were true, Milady Allison, then we would have done much more to you than restrain you with a paralysis spell!”

  “Then why so many mages?” Allison asked, meeting her gaze evenly. “Why so many if they didn’t believe that your life was in danger? I saw the fear in everyone’s eyes, Raya. I saw it in yours! Couldn’t you, alone, have cast this spell over me?”

  Allison was surprised when a male voice answered her, not Raya’s, a voice that she recognized from the celebration. “It’s true that it was Raya who summoned us here,” Maldon noted as he boldly moved up to her bedside, “but we came not for the danger that you posed to her, but to the danger you posed to yourself. And why so many? Well, to be frank, it took the combined powers of us all to cast a paralysis spell that was powerful enough not to be broken by all the energy you had accumulated in your body. We feared that you would start gesturing and weaving this magic into reckless spells in your sleep. You even managed to break our spell for a few moments after we jolted you awake! I could hardly believe my own eyes when I saw you clutch your blankets!”

  Maldon stared down at her gravely. “You would have killed yourself for certain, if not by your reckless spells, then by the Mage-field energies consuming your body. Aidric charged us with your safety, as did the king, until the Mage-general returns. I, for one, would rather eat my dagger, point first, than allow anything to happen to you and have to face Aidric’s wrath!”

  At the mention of Aidric’s name, Allison suddenly remembered the bone-chilling dreams she had been having before she was literally jolted awake. She abruptly tried to sit up in her agitation and to her chagrin, remembered that she couldn’t move anything below her neck.

  Her agitation must have been obvious on her face because Raya suddenly frowned down at her and asked, “Allison, what is it? Are you starting to see another—”

  “My dream,” Allison interrupted, swallowing nervously as she eyed all the strange and vaguely familiar faces around her. “You said that it was a Foresight dream. Does that mean that it’s going to happen?”

  “Possibly,” Raya said carefully. “Sometimes the dreams are sent to us by Seni as merely a warning of one of the things that could happen. It depends on our actions. By the way you were carrying on earlier, I gather this dream involved Aidric?”

  Allison nodded. “It did, and if there’s even a remote chance that it’ll happen, then we need to warn him! Please let me up!”

  Raya glanced over at Maldon, who nodded slightly, before they both moved closer to the bed and waved their hands over her body. A split-second later, she felt the familiar pins and needles sensation sweep throughout her limbs as they came alive. Allison sat up gingerly with a grateful smile for them, and rubbed her arms to get the circulation going again.

  “Thanks,” Allison said as she started to get out of the bed. “I hate being under that spell. It makes me feel so helpless.”

  “And where do you think you’re going?” Raya said sternly. “The healers say you still aren’t well, and after channeling so much energy just now, you should feel as though a herd of crazed antar just trampled you.”

  “I feel fine,” Allison insisted. “Really I—” Suddenly the room turned upside down and sideways at the same time and the next thing she knew, Maldon was laying her head back down onto the pillow.

  “You see?” Raya said with a chuckle. “Damned if you are as headstrong as Aidric! He could be bleeding out of his eyes and still insist that he’s fine!”

  “But I have to tell you about my dream,” Allison protested weakly.

  Maldon sighed and said to Raya, “We might as well hear her out. I have a feeling that she won’t rest unless she recounts it.”

  “Oh, very well,” Raya grumbled as she turned to the three other mages in the room. “If you wish, you may leave us now. I’ll keep Maldon here to assist me should she suddenly fall into another fit. I’m sure he’ll be enough.”

  Was it her imagination, or did the other mages seem relieved to finally be allowed to leave?

  After Raya and Maldon settled themselves into a couple of chairs near her bedside, Raya said, “All right, Allison, we’re listening.”

  “I saw him on an open field,” Allison began, frowning as her head began to pound insistently as she thought back to the dream. She did her best to ignore the pain. “I could see the shadow of mountains in the distance. There were bodies everywhere, soldiers dying, and those—creatures I saw earlier.”

  “Dyani,” Maldon sa
id flatly.

  Allison nodded and continued, “It was awful. People were being slaughtered right before my eyes. I could see Aren and Keldan and a few other mages keeping those—those things from swarming into a village I could just barely see in the distance.

  “Aidric was off alone, fending off an even larger swarm. There was a sudden flash of both blue and white light, and for a few moments, I couldn’t see anything. When the light cleared, I could see another strange man just barely visible in the distance behind Aidric. Somehow I knew that he was a mage and that Roderick had sent him.

  “The mage’s thoughts were flowing into my mind. The whole attack on Idona was a trap. It seemed that Roderick wanted King Diryan to send as many mages as possible to Idona’s aid. He planned to either capture or slaughter all the mages as part of an even larger plan I couldn’t see, but his main target was Aidric. That mage planned to strike at Aidric from behind with a poisoned dagger. Aidric was on his knees, dazed by that earlier explosion of light, I think. I knew he didn’t know that the mage was there. I shouted a warning to him even though I knew he couldn’t hear me, but then Aidric instantly turned around ready to strike as if he did hear me—”

  Raya and Maldon exchanged glances and then fixed their eyes on her so intently that she began to shift uncomfortably in her bed.

  “What?” Allison asked finally when the silence and scrutiny became unbearable.

  “What you described,” Raya began slowly, “thought-speaking within a Foresight dream—it just isn’t possible. The dream is a telling of a possible future. There is no possible way for the dreamer to affect what’s being shown to them—at least it has never been possible before.”

  “What in the name of God does that mean?” Allison demanded.

  “We’re not sure,” Raya replied uneasily. “This is out of my depth of understanding.”