DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga)

by R. A. Salvatore

  Lady Dasslerond and an entourage of three others trotted easily through the forest, sometimes leaping and fluttering their delicate wings to climb to and about the lower boughs, sometimes running along the ground with a gait that seemed more a dance than a run, more a celebration of life than a means of travel. They sang as they went, a communal voice that blended harmoniously with the natural sounds of the nighttime forest, so much so that casual listeners would not even notice that the elven song floated about the trees. For that was the way with the Touel’alfar, a simple appreciation of life and beauty, a joining that was complete with their enchanted land. The rangers of Corona understood that truth, but few others ever could; for the other truth about the Touel’alfar was an attitude of absolute superiority over every other race, a belief that they alone were the chosen race. Only the elven-trained rangers even came close to measuring up beside one of the People, as far as the elves were concerned.

  For rangers-in-training who did not measure up to the standards imposed by Lady Dasslerond, the consequences could be dire.

  Dasslerond thought of this now as she made her way through the forest, after confirming her suspicions that young Aydrian had taken the pouch of gemstones without her permission. Perhaps it was time for the training to cease, for her to admit failure, for her to seek other avenues for removing the stain of Bestesbulzibar from the fair elven valley.

  The group approached the tree beneath which young Aydrian was still at Oracle. Others were around the area, and Dasslerond’s song told them to keep a watchful eye, forewarned them that there was trouble afoot.

  Still, all the warning in the world could not have prepared any of the elves for the catastrophe that was Aydrian.

  Lady Dasslerond, so intent on the tree, saw it first, a rising glow of orange speckling up the trunk behind the thinner areas of bark.

  The lady of Caer’alfar stopped abruptly on a low branch some distance away, and those running with her took the cue and similarly stopped. She felt it, then, they all did, a tingling of mounting energy, of sheer mounting power. The elves usually welcomed the powers of the universe, but this energy, Dasslerond knew, was not akin to that which she often summoned through her mighty emerald, though the source of both was surely a gemstone. No, this energy had a different quality altogether, was wrought of anger. Her mind flashed back to the time Aydrian had battled against the harmony of a graphite, when he had torn the magic from it in a burst of outrage.

  The orange glow climbed and climbed, running out along the branches. Only then did Lady Dasslerond notice that one of her kin, Briesendel, was in that very tree, standing on a higher branch and appearing absolutely confused.

  She yelled for the younger elf to leap, but her cry was buried a moment later when the energy released a tremendous fireball that engulfed the tree, angry orange leaping into the nighttime sky with such intensity and ferocity that the faces of those elves closest the conflagration turned bright red from the heat and the flash.

  Lady Dasslerond could hardly draw breath, and not from the heat of the sudden fire. She watched helplessly as Briesendel fell out of that blaze, her delicate wings trailing fire. She tried to flap those wings, tried to slow her descent, but she could not, and she hit the ground hard, groaning and trying to roll.

  Many elves moved toward her; so did Dasslerond, but she stopped herself and realized what she must do. She brought out her emerald and reached into its magical depths with all her heart and strength, calling to the magic, begging the magic to come to the aid of Briesendel and Andur’Blough Inninness.

  Dark clouds rushed together overhead, their bottoms reflecting the bright orange in washes and lines of color.

  Lady Dasslerond reached deeper into the gemstone, calling, begging.

  Even as the bluish-glowing form of Aydrian crawled out of the hole at the bottom of the tree, the downpour began, a thick and drenching rain.

  Aydrian staggered away, looking back at what he had done, and for a moment Lady Dasslerond hoped that perhaps this dramatic lesson would finally exact the change so necessary within the boy.

  A fleeting moment, though, for Dasslerond saw into Aydrian’s heart at that moment, as reflected in his eyes. He was shocked, indeed, but there glowed pride there beyond any thought of remorse.

  Dasslerond’s lips grew very thin, and, as if another of the Touel’alfar had read her every thought, an arrow zipped across the small field to strike Aydrian in the leg.

  The young man cried out and spun to see Briesendel lying on the ground, two others beside her, batting out the flames and trying to tend to her.

  Now his expression became one of horror—but not, Dasslerond recognized, horror for what he had done. Rather, this one was horrified by the potential consequences to him from what he had done.

  Another elvish arrow soared through the night air, but Aydrian was ready this time, and he managed to dive aside, then started to run off, limping from the wound in his leg.

  “No more!” Dasslerond called out to the archer, holding up her hand. “I will punish young Aydrian.” Her tone alone told all the others that young Aydrian would not likely survive that punishment.

  You do not need them anymore, the voice in Aydrian’s head screamed. They were coming to expel you for taking the gemstones. You have outgrown them, and that frightens them!

  He didn’t know how to answer that voice, and couldn’t take the time to consider it anyway. All Aydrian understood was that the elves were after him, and given the fact that he had a small arrow stuck into his thigh, he didn’t think that they’d be in any mood to discuss his actions.

  He scrambled and he ran. He tripped over a root and fell headlong, the jar deepening the wound and sending a wash of pain screeching through his body. He clutched at the leg with one hand and went for his gemstones, for the healing hematite, with the other. He wanted to stop the pain, of course, but more than that, he realized, he had to get out of there.

  The voice in his head screamed at him, calmed him, and then guided him as his hand fished about in his cache of gemstones, settling on two: malachite and lodestone.

  A moment later, Aydrian felt himself growing lighter, rising off the ground, floating within the levitational power of the malachite. Then he reached out with the lodestone, feeling the emanations of all the metals in the area. He looked out farther, beyond the forest, to the rocky peaks of the mountains that encompassed the elven valley. He sensed metal there, somewhere, nowhere specific, but far beyond Andur’Blough Inninness.

  Then he was flying through the trees, and then above the trees, his weightless form spirited away by the magnetic pull of the gemstone.

  He never found the exact focus of that pull, for his energy began to wane long before he reached it. But he was out of the valley, at least, for the first time since his infancy, up high on the side of a rocky mountain, with a cold wind blowing about him and snow speckling the ground beneath him. He let go the powers of the lodestone first, and then, as he slowed, he gradually diminished the malachite, setting himself gently down in the snow.

  The cold felt good against his wound, but he went immediately for the hematite, sensing its healing powers. He pressed the stone against his wound and fell within the swirling gray depths, embracing the magic. Sometime during that trance, and hardly aware of the movement, Aydrian yanked the arrow out of his leg.

  And sometime after that, the young man regained full consciousness, let the magical powers drift away, and let himself drift out of their enthralling hold.

  It was still before the dawn, and the downpour had spread throughout the region. He could see the elven valley looming dark below him, his fire obviously extinguished.

  Aydrian lay back, cold and soaked and still in pain, and more than that, confused and more frightened than he had ever been.

  Those feelings only intensified a few moments later, when the ground before Aydrian seemed to stretch weirdly and then contracted suddenly, a distortion of distance itself.

  Lady Dasslerond rode
that distortion. She stood before Aydrian, towering over the prone young man.

  “I did not mean …” he started to say, but his words died away as it became obvious to him that Dasslerond wasn’t listening to him. She stood there, seeming tall and terrible, with her arm extended, the emerald glowing green in the night, too bright to be any reflected moonlight. Aydrian understood that she was summoning the gemstone’s powers, and good luck and instinct alone got his hand into his pocket onto his own stones as the emerald’s magic released.

  Vines crawled up out of the ground below him, enwrapping him, tightening about him, twining with each other.

  And then, when they had fully secured him, they began to recede to their subterranean domain, pressing the breath from Aydrian’s body.

  He brought up his serpentine fire shield, brought up the fire of the ruby, a sudden and violent burst that disintegrated many of those grabbing vines and lessened the grip of the others.

  He brought forth the power of the graphite next, before he could even consider the move, and lashed out at Lady Dasslerond with a sudden burst of lightning.

  He heard her groan, though he couldn’t see her from his angle.

  The vines let go and Aydrian jumped up to his feet, and faced the lady of Caer’alfar.

  “You disgrace your father!” Dasslerond yelled at him, and she seemed even more fierce than usual, for her golden hair was all aflutter from the tingling of his electrical burst. “You bring dishonor to your name and tragedy to those who brought you in to care for you!”

  “It was an accident!” Aydrian cried, fighting back the tears that welled behind his eyes.

  “It was the logical conclusion to your reckless course,” Lady Dasslerond shouted back. “The inevitable result of who you are, Aydrian Wyndon, and the proof that you are no ranger, and shall never be one!”

  Aydrian tried to respond to that, but found that no words could come to him, no argument, no pleas. “I will leave,” he said softly.

  “You will give me the gemstones,” Dasslerond commanded.

  Aydrian instinctively recoiled and when he looked more deeply into the lady of Caer’alfar’s eyes, he understood the source of his trepidation. For she was not going to let him walk away, he knew then without doubt. She was going to take the gemstones and kill him, then and there.

  With a growl, he brought forth the power of the hematite again, the soul stone, not for healing this time, but to send his iron will rushing out to crash against the resolve of Lady Dasslerond. And there, in the spiritual realm of the hematite, the two did battle, their wills manifesting themselves as shadowy creatures engaging each other viciously.

  And there, on a mountainside outside Andur’Blough Inninness, Aydrian Wyndon, the son of Elbryan and Jilseponie, the bastard child of the demon dactyl manifested through Father Abbot Dalebert Markwart, overwhelmed Lady Dasslerond of Caer’alfar, brought the great lady, one of the most powerful creatures in all the world, to her knees before him.

  He could have killed her then, could have simply snapped her willpower and forced her spirit to forever evacuate her body. He almost did it, in part out of his need to defend himself, in part because of his frustration, in part because of his fear, and in part because he hated the elves and was jealous of them and their long life spans—immeasurably long by the reckoning of human beings, who might have twenty generations pass in the time of one elven life.

  He could have killed her, but he did not. Rather, he let her go, and she stumbled backward as if his will alone had been holding her up.

  “Go away,” he said to her.

  “The gemstones …” she started to respond, her voice seeming thin and weak.

  “Go away,” Aydrian said to her again, his grave tone leaving no room for debate or bargaining. “They are mine, passed down from my people by your own admission.”

  “You are no ranger!” said Dasslerond, and she seemed as if she wanted to reach into her emerald again. But she reconsidered, apparently, and wisely so, for if she had brought forth her powers again, Aydrian would have utterly destroyed her.

  “I am no plaything for Dasslerond’s amusement,” Aydrian retorted. “But I have these,” he added, pulling a handful of gemstones from his pocket. “And I have my own people, out there.” He waved his arm as he spoke, away from the elven valley, but, he realized, in no particular direction. For in truth, despite his bravado, Aydrian Wyndon felt very much the little lost boy at that moment. “And I am keeping the mirror!” he finished with a huff of pure defiance.

  “This is not over,” Lady Dasslerond promised, and she did reach into her gemstone again, distorting and compressing the landscape behind her, then riding its reversion to put herself far, far from Aydrian Wyndon.

  Aydrian stood there, trembling from rage and from fear. A few moments later, he looked around at the wide world he had just entered, and suddenly it seemed to him much wider than he ever could have imagined.

  “Where am I to go?” he asked aloud, and no voices answered in his head.

  He was cold and he was alone, and the life he had known had just abruptly ended.

  And he couldn’t begin to fathom the truth of the life he had just entered.

  Lady Dasslerond stood in Andur’Blough Inninness, beside the group who continued to tend the injured Briesendel. She would survive, thankfully, but never again would she know the beauty of elvish wings.

  Dasslerond wasn’t really paying much attention at that moment to her younger friend’s plight.

  Too concerned was she over the escape of Aydrian Wyndon. She felt his power again, and keenly, something as great and misguided as anything she, who had battled the demon dactyl, had ever known.

  A shudder coursed the elf’s spine as she considered the part she had played in the creation of this monster, this magnificent and truly terrible warrior.

  They taught me to fight better than any man alive. They taught me to view the world philosophically and spiritually, to question and to learn. They taught me to appreciate the simple beauty of things, the way that every aspect of nature complements every other. They gave me so many profound gifts; I cannot deny this.

  And yet, I hate them, with all my heart and soul. Were I to raise an army tomorrow, I would turn it upon Andur’Blough Inninness and raze the valley. I would see Lady Dasslerond and every one of her taunting kin dead in the grass.

  In truth, I am frightened by my own level of anger toward them.

  I remember once overhearing Belli’mar Juraviel and To’el Dallia speaking of their respective trainees. Belli’mar was explaining the latest test they had devised for Brynn Dharielle, a challenge of tracking, and was saying that he and Dasslerond had devised a series of tests, each one more difficult than the previous, until she reached a level of trial that she simply could not pass. Only then could they truly judge her potential, and only then could she truly understand her limitations.

  That made sense to me, for I, still young in my power with the gemstones, have already come to understand that the greatest asset of a warrior, the thing that will keep a warrior alive, is the ability to understand his limitations, the wisdom not to overstep those bounds. A warrior has to choose right every time he picks a fight or else he is no more than a dead warrior. I appreciated the Touel’alfar and their techniques at that moment, for their honesty and integrity, for their high expectations of each of us. They would bring us to the level where we could honestly, and without self-doubt, take the title of ranger.

  Or Brynn could, at least.

  For then To’el, my mentor, had explained to Belli’mar Juraviel the course that Lady Dasslerond had set out for me, a regimen of trial after trial, and with the expectation—nay, the demand—that I would not fail any of the challenges. I could not fail, as To’el explained, for I had to be the perfection of form as a ranger.

  I should have been flattered. In retrospect, I am surprised that I, though only a dozen years of age at the time, recognized the horrible truth of that statement for what it was. I ex
pected Belli’mar Juraviel, as close to a friend as I had among the Touel’alfar—which says little, I admit—to recoil from such a suggestion as that, to tell To’el that he would go straight off to speak with Lady Dasslerond.

  He said, “Tweken’di marra-tie viel vien Ple’caeralfar.”

  I can hear the resonance of those words in my head now, these years later, more clearly than I heard them that long-ago day. Tweken’di marra-tie viel vien Ple’caeralfar. It is an old elvish saying—and the Touel’alfar seem to possess a limitless number of those!—which has no literal translation into the common tongue of men but is something akin to “reaching high into the starry canopy.” For the elves, the saying refers to the joy of their eventide dance, when they leap and stretch and try to enter the spiritual realm of the stars themselves, shedding their earthbound forms and soaring into the heavens above. Or, in a less literal usage, the saying refers to the high expectations placed upon someone.

  When Belli’mar Juraviel spoke those words concerning me, he was saying that he fully expected that I would live up to the demands that Lady Dasslerond had imposed upon me. It was a compliment, I suppose, but as the months of trial moved along, Belli’mar’s words became a heavy weight wrapped about my neck. The Touel’alfar would take care not to limit me by setting their expectations too low, but might they be limiting, as well, by setting their expectations—expectations and not hopes—too high? If they ask of me perfection of form, of body, of mind, and most important, of spirit, are those expectations potentially translated into a most profound sense of failure should I not attain the desired level, and immediately? And as important, are those expectations indelibly embedded in the minds of the elders? Would Lady Dasslerond have offered more room for discretion if she was not absorbed by this need that I become the epitome of a ranger, the symbol of perfection in human form, as defined by the elves? She did not say to me upon our parting that I could not become that very best of rangers but that I could never become a ranger at all. Her disappointment, I think, sent her flying into a world of absolutes, where nothing but the best could suffice.