“I liked her as she was!” one of them cried.
Another one of her servants, one of her first, a part-human named Khurley pointed a clawed finger. “You will have the Mother take away her memories and she will be one of us but she won’t be Mellinda anymore!”
“I will take nothing from her. The Mother will choose!” the king told them.
“Let her take you too!” cried Welven and the powerful trollkin let out a screech as he charged at the king.
Xeldryn softened his staff, hoping to be able to knock some sense into Mellinda’s mourning servant, but Rembis stepped in front of him. The ram-horned trollkin slashed out with his Jharro sword.
The blade caught Welven across the throat and he stumbled in surprise. Welven clutched at the wound in shock, sliding over the lip of the bank and into the water.
“No one touches the king!” Rembis shouted, pointing the blade at the angry crowd.
“No, Rembis! He doesn’t regenerate!” the king snapped. Such a blow would be disabling for certain, but most trollkin would survive it and make a full recovery within hours. But not so for Welven.
The king dove into the water which was already clouded with blood. He grabbed Welven’s shaking body and the First and Murtha came to the bank to help pull him out, but it was too late. He had lost too much blood.
Several of Mellinda’s servants charged and the king’s guards fought back.
* * *
Mellinda lost consciousness briefly, the shock of losing her connection to Arcon getting the best of her. Every instinct of a soul when free of its body is to quiet its thoughts and hibernate until its situation changed. But this wasn’t the first time she had been in such a situation. Mellinda was a veteran when it came to winning the fight over death.
She forced her mind to stay aware. Because that’s all she was. A spirit. Basically a free-floating mind that hadn’t quite passed to the next plane of existence.
She realized that she wasn’t alone in this void. She was surrounded by spirits. Thousands of them. All captured by the Mother, waiting to be attached to a new body.
If she waited with them the Mother would eventually place her in a new body. She would be reborn a trollkin, likely a physically impressive creature, but that was all. Her powers had been stripped from her during her last death. All the magic she had been using since then had been either stolen from Arcon or borrowed from the Rings of Stardeon.
She would be reborn as a regular trollkin with all her past memories, her triumphs and failures, removed and she would find herself slavishly devoted to the behemoth that she had created a millennia ago. It was an ironic idea and almost appealing in the sense that she would have no knowledge of what she had lost. Was that simple kind of life, disgusting as it was bound to be, such a bad thing?
She started to wonder what kind of creature she would end up as. The Mother generally took the material of the original host body and mixed it with troll and sometimes some other foreign body. Then it occurred to her that she hadn’t been in a human body when dissolved. Her soul had been contained in that moonrat eye.
That thought scared Mellinda more than anything else she could think of. This could be her future. A trollrat, trapped inside her own body, able to think but unable to make any sound other than a chittering moan. Or screech.
She refused to sit still and wait for that fate. Despite her lack of power, she did have two things going for her. Experience and mental dexterity. If she could escape this place she could at least move on to whatever new reality existed after death.
Mellinda managed to push her way past the other sleeping souls to get a better grasp of where she was or how she could escape. She sensed that the chamber she was in was a great bladder made of bewitching magic. Both the entrance and exit to the place were manned by black tendrils that moved the souls either in for storage or out for use.
Mellinda did not think she would be able to leave in either of those ways. She pressed up against the wall of this place wishing that she had just some fraction of her former power and to her surprise, she found that she did. It was a tiny fraction, just a few short black feelers were all that remained of her vast glory. But perhaps that would be enough.
She worked at the wall, peeling away at the magic bit by bit. It took a very long time, how long Mellinda had no way of knowing, but she pressed on, thinning that wall until she finally broke through.
Immediately upon leaving the place of holding, she felt the familiar pull of the afterlife. It was steady and strong and promised something new. It would be so easy to go. All she had to do was accept it.
Mellinda couldn’t resist one quick look around before she left, though. She pushed her thoughts through the ether that was the spiritual interior of the Troll Mother. What she saw astounded her.
There, tethered to the brain of the creature, where she had expected to see a frail tattered bit of thull soul, was instead a human soul. The spirit magic that ran the Mother’s womb likely came from this spirit.
Mellinda didn’t understand how this had happened. Perhaps one of the Troll Mother’s victims had fought back and somehow attached itself to the Mother’s mind. But it hadn’t been a victory. Not really.
The Mother was an immense being, so vast in size that it was incomprehensible for a human mind. Whoever had attached themselves to the Mother had done so at the cost of their own sanity. The spirit was weak, stretched thin, likely operating under delusions. In fact, she doubted that there was much of its original humanity left to it at all. Just the basic desires.
This explained how it had been able to converse with Mellinda. Not exactly how it had recognized her or her former title as Troll Queen, but it did explain a lot. Its desire to reproduce, its hunger for power. Very basic human traits . . .
That was when Mellinda realized the enormous opportunity she had been given. This soul was weak. She was not. And if there was any one human soul in the world that would be able to handle control over a vast monstrous being, it was her. Not much different from being the Moonrat Mother after all.
She grinned inwardly. Death would lose to her once again.
Mellinda attacked.
* * *
As word got out about what had happened to Mellinda the people picked sides. Those who would follow the king and those who would reject him for what he had done. Fighting broke out. The deaths were few but the anger was real.
The followers of Mellinda outnumbered the followers of the king by a large amount, but the king’s followers had someone to fight for while those that were against the king had only their own anger to motivate them. For two days the trollkin were embroiled in battle and then the city settled into an uneasy sort of truce.
The king’s followers settled in and around the Axis Palace and the Library while Mellinda’s followers took over New-Kin and the Old Hospital. All attempts to continue the war against the Roo-Tan and Mer-Dan collective ceased, but those trollkin that had already been sent out continued to fight, having no idea of what had happened back home.
During that time, Xeldryn opened up his cache of Jharro weapons, allowing anyone that felt the pull of their old weapon to retrieve it. Out of all who looked over the wood, less than a hundred succeeded.
With that done, Xeldryn tried to focus on his work at the Mother’s womb. Handling the culling all by themselves was a strain on his followers, but each newborn was now loyal to the king only.
On the third day after Mellinda had been swallowed the king was working at the womb when something unexpected happened. The womb squeezed shut and the Mother convulsed.
The ripple caused by Mellinda’s attack on the Troll Mother’s mind if seen from above would seem like a small thing. On the ground it was terrifying. As Mellinda’s soul wrested control of the behemoth the landscape of the swamps changed. In some places the ground shot up by three to five feet, in others it sunk by the same amount.
The waters shifted to fill in the gaps. Justan and Tarah’s group found themselves falling a
s the ground suddenly moved out from under them. Filthy water rushed in and they were forced to swim to safety.
Those battling at the edge of the swamps heard it coming and felt the approaching rumble under their feet. Then everyone fell to the ground as the earth shifted violently. The upheaval lasted only a few seconds.
All went still.
In KhanzaRoo there was great destruction. Grassy islands shifted violently, destroying bridges and collapsing houses. The water level rose by two feet, covering most of the solid surfaces. Only the stone buildings anchored to the bedrock were untouched. The water didn’t rise quite high enough to flood the interiors.
For Xeldryn this was an even more frightening experience. The banks of the lake sank two feet and the water rose until the area was unrecognizable. Only the high back of the lone chair protruded above the waterline.
He immediately knew that there were many people in KhanzaRoo that were hurt or in need of help and yet here they were fighting with each other. He called out orders and urged his people to help each other. He told them to reach out to the trollkin on the other side of the city and see who needed help.
The mother’s womb didn’t rise again that day and that evening he noticed a more terrible change. The chemicals in the water changed. All of the Mother’s thoughts, those assurances carried to her servants at all times simply went inert. Xeldryn returned to Solitude and stood in the water where the shore had once been and saw the First emerge.
The very first trollkin, whose only non trollish attributes were his eyes and mouth, was crying. “She’s gone. Mother’s gone!” He grabbed at his chest, his claws piercing his skin as he said, “We killed her.”
Xeldryn didn’t understand at first. Then the womb rose out of the water in front of him and the surface of the flesh changed. Two eyes formed in the side of the mound, followed by a nose and a pair of full lips. It mouthed something and then frowned and tried again.
This time a voice came out of the mouth and even though the intonation wasn’t quite right, there was no mistaking the mocking nature of its words. “It is over for you now. My people need no king.”
Xeldryn’s heart sank. The First was right. They really had killed her.
The Mother had given them everything and they had tricked her into swallowing a snake.
* * *
For a time Mellinda had considered killing the old king and his ilk, simply capturing and swallowing them. But that would have been a waste of potential resources. They could be useful at a later date. She lowered her womb back into the water, a plan forming in her mind.
One sad and unforeseen side effect of killing the spirit of the old Mother was that her spirit magic had left with her. Mellinda was in control, but she now had no way of creating new children of her own.
No matter, she decided. She would make use of the children she had.
Mellinda caused another mound of flesh to rise in front of the Old Hospital. The sudden appearance by the Mother in this part of the city was completely unexpected, but also welcome.
A crowd began to form around the mound, some of the people reaching out reverently to touch it. The recent upheaval had caused much fear to ripple through the trollkin and some had worried that their goddess had forsaken them. This was proof that she was still there.
Mellinda formed her face in its side. It was more detailed this time. More of her former beauty was evident. She was getting better at this. Of course she had known she would. Past experience told her that controlling such things just took practice.
A gasp rolled through the crowd, many of them recoiling. Mellinda’s eyes scanned them, looking for someone she could use. The face smiled. “Recks!”
The beautiful part-elf, his gaze both joyful and frightened, pushed to the front of the crowd. “Mellinda? My queen?”
“Yes, it is me, my beautiful Recks,” she said. Her voice sounded more like her than it had when speaking with the king.
“What has happened to you?” he wondered, reaching out to touch the mound hesitantly.
“The Mother and I have become one,” she intoned. This was the lie that seemed to work best in her mind. After all, she couldn’t really tell them that she had killed and usurped their goddess. “She has instructions for you and all of the rest of my followers. Everyone assemble back here in one hour. Prepare for battle.”
She was quite pleased by his joyful reaction. This was going to be far easier than she had thought. Mellinda then moved her thoughts to New-Kin where she appeared to the commanders of her army. They were so well trained.
They asked few questions and formed ranks immediately. Thousands of trollkin. Many of them with kernels of power active inside them. When she opened the womb in front of them, they marched right in.
An hour later when she opened another womb at the hospital, Recks and all of her most devout followers entered. She had her army. In the womb they would receive all the nourishment that they needed from her just as they had when originally in the mother. Oh, and how much quicker it would be to transport them this way.
Aloysius would be so surprised. She would have to form an eye nearby when it happened so that she could watch his amazement as he was killed.
Next came the largest task. This one took the most effort and concentration as she reached her thoughts into the furthermost extremities of her enormous new body. This was quite similar in some ways to her old ability to control a vast army of moonrats, but it was easier.
She wasn’t forcing thousands of independent minds to do her will. This was just simply all her. There was something freeing about that.
Slowly she began pulling her flesh in from the farthest distances. Mellinda had no need to stretch to the shoreline at the moment. She also had no need to touch the wide river or extend so far to the western edge.
As she moved her body the landscape changed once again. The center of the Troll Swamps rose. The outer edges fell. Perhaps one day she would expand out that direction again. Perhaps not. Right now she had a different goal and it was one that made her positively giddy.
She began to burrow northward. It was time to devour the Grove.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Charz couldn’t remember ever being this tired. For him, fighting had always been fierce action followed by an agonizing wait. In the Arena, he would fight once or twice a day. They were fierce battles, followed by waiting and healing as he heard the crowds cheering on others. When he had been tethered to his cave there had often been days or weeks between idiotic challengers looking for treasure. Even in the last two wars, his battles had been separated by days.
For four days straight Charz had been fighting, taking nothing more than a short breather here or there. It wasn’t that he wasn’t allowed one. It was just that he didn’t require one. Meanwhile the humans, though amazing fighters especially those Roo-Tan elites, would run out of energy. Charz knew that if he could keep fighting, fewer of them would die.
His magic kept working tirelessly, healing wounds whether physical or magical. His problem was lack of sleep. The giant had been a little loopy since part way through the second day. Random things made him laugh, like a goofy face on a corpse or that time when his middle finger broke and stuck straight up no matter what he did.
One time he actually fell asleep standing up, his fist still stuck down the throat of a dead beast. What woke him up wasn’t the occasional punches of the trollkin around him. It was when the beast came back alive and chewed frantically on his arm.
These trollkin were tougher than they had seemed at first glance. The regular ones went down fairly easy, but they kept getting back up. The monstrous ones were even more annoying. At least Ewzad Vriil’s tortured beasts had the sense to turn to jelly when they were killed.
To make things more complicated, their powers weren’t consistent. Some healed almost as quick as you hurt them. Others would grow an arm back if you pulled it off and beat them with it. Some had magic. Some had that troll allergy to pepper and some didn’t.
This made things challenging, which was fun in its own way for Charz, but frightening for the human troops and their commanders who were trying to come up with better strategies for fighting the trollkin. The thing that bothered Charz the most was when they died easy. There was something incredibly sad about that.
He was swaying on his feet, fighting sleep harder than he was fighting the trollkin, when everything changed.
The swamp swelled. The ground rose beneath him ten then twenty feet into the air. Charz was knocked onto his back, landing atop the bodies of trollkin and human alike. At that point he was so tired that he didn’t mind.
The frontline witches, struggling to keep the Mother still, were caught off guard by the sudden movement. Many of them were thrown off their feet and their spells were broken. The burrowing flesh of the Mother surged under them.
The trollkin, seeing their goddess taking action for the first time since the battle began, cheered. But Mellinda wasn’t worried about their fight. She continued to burrow, letting them fend for themselves.
Her movement was a series of swift surges and stops as she gathered in more of her flesh and pushed it forward through the earth. As the behemoth sent her body northward, the landscape was changed. The rising hillscape caused by her tunneling was twenty feet tall and a hundred feet wide. It traveled in a straight line away from the swamps, moving under the main encampment of the combined armies and continuing forward.
It was immediately evident to the generals where the behemoth was going. Tarah’s dream had been right. Aloysius could only trust that the counter measures he had put in place would work.
Word was sent ahead of the Mother’s tunneling using the network of Jharro rings. The secondary encampment garrisoned just outside Roo-Tan’lan was notified. At the Mother’s current pace of movement, they had less than three days to prepare.
Behemoth (The Jharro Grove Saga Book 6) Page 39
