The waves returned, speaking in the steady rhythm of the tides. “The South. She has stood alone in the past. She can again.”
“They haven’t the time,” Tsellien pleaded with the unseen void of eternity. “The Elements sense their advantage. They roil in fury against thinning barriers, slipping though uncountable weak points, man-made or not. Soon, a great storm will boil through the world.”
A distant avalanche’s roar: “And you would cast this one adrift into that storm? Returning this one would leave her alone and lost in a life of strife. She’d be flawed and weak and ignorant. Her earthly time, and yours, is at an end. We wait for Rebirth.”
“And while we wait the world will unknowingly depend on a single set of shoulders,” Tsellien said, her voice losing its passion, its humanity. “I’d rather balance the world along an axis than a mere point. Yes, this one will be flawed but we all are. That’s the weakness and strength of our line.”
As Tsellien made her case, Tyrissa felt… nothing. They spoke of her yet she regarded the conversation as about someone else. She was but an observer, and a distracted one at that. The flecks of shadow began to reappear in the silver fog, vile imperfections that floated in the calming clouds and ate away at the warmth of this place. She wanted to cry out a warning, but lacked the means. She knew they were here for her, here to claim their prize.
‘We’ll still have you,’ said the memory of a corrupt chorus.
The wind sighed across a mountain valley, stirring the boughs of an expanse of needled treetops, “Proceed, daughter.” With that it retreated into the void, blowing away like sand scratching over the cracked stonework of a dead empire, leaving only a sudden emptiness.
Tyrissa felt the mists draw away, but the motes of shadow remained, multiplying, threatening in their profane presence. Tsellien knelt at her side, the woman’s face an indistinct artist’s sketch, her body wrapped in gently billowing sashes of regal purple and silver. Pristine white feathered wings spread from her back, an encompassing shroud that blocked none of the omnipresent light. Tyrissa felt a weight press onto her chest, through her heart. Tsellien’s eyes flared into two pools of molten silver, narrowed in concentration. Filigree flows of divine energy ran between them. Connecting. Binding.
“Few get second chances, child of Morgale. If you live you will live for our cause alone.” Her voice now held an angelic timbre as timeless as the First’s. A surging, unreal heat spread through Tyrissa’s body. She felt solid again, rebuilt. Still, those inky motes of shadow pressed in, some extending clawing fingers that wormed through her being, as cold as death.
“A life of service or the oblivion of death. Do you accept?” Tsellien’s voice became as the mists around them, filth-specked and distorted. The corruption’s strength grew close to overpowering the purity of this place, the mists now more black than silver.
“Yes,” Tyrissa said, the word a spectral whisper carrying the weight of the universe.
“Prove yourself worthy of this legacy, daughter.”
Tsellien placed a hand on Tyrissa forehead and pushed her down and away in a burst of blinding silver light. As she fell through the mists, a celestial bundle of energy burned like a young star in her heart. On came the darkness from below, that missing embrace of oblivion. It dared not touch her now, its chill held at bay by the heat of raw, radiant power that blazed within her.
Chapter Eight
Warmth. For a stunning slice of eternity all Tyrissa felt was warmth. The spectral conversation between Tsellien and the First dissolved away like the details of a dream, until all that remained was the wash of silver light and their final words: Prove Yourself Worthy.
Tyrissa awoke to the warmth of the afternoon sun shining upon her face through one of the rifts in the ceiling of the temple. Her eyes fluttered open, settling into a squint against the light. Her heart held a calm beat, and her first breath drew in the sweetest air she’d ever tasted, even if it was thick with the scent of blood.
Blood. It was everywhere and she lay at the center of a congealed pool. Tyrissa could feel it soaked through the back of her tattered clothes, stains coating her arms and face, dried flecks falling away when she moved. Her stomach heaved in revulsion as she realized this was all her blood. Then the memories of what transpired flooded back into her mind, every agonizing detail. Tyrissa sat up with a startled cry accompanied by the vile sound of peeling away from the sticky floor. Her hands went to her abdomen where the daemon’s fatal, savage blow landed and found only clean skin ringed by her torn shirt. All of the lesser, countless cuts from the fight were also gone. She checked her left side for the long, jagged scar from a nasty fall years ago, brushing away caked-on blood. Nothing. Her arm was clear of the weeks old scars from the wurm as well.
She was alive, reborn, rebuilt. Her mind twisted in rejection, racing for a denial. It was a dream. This was the afterlife. This is a daemon’s final trick.
No. I’m alive. Even if I smell of nothing but death.
The thought was horrifying and exhilarating in equal measure.
Tyrissa pulled her legs, stiff and caked with blood, free of the pool. She crawled a few paces away, pushing aside the ring of stones. Where she once lay there was now an outline in the blood pool. Out of the sunlight and the disorientation fading, she noticed that not all was well. Her left foot still burned with a persistent, acidic heat where the daemon grabbed her. She yanked off the half melted and useless remnants of her boot, the sole hanging on by frayed strips of once-fine Morg leatherwork. Pain flashed through her like lightning and her scream echoing through the empty cathedral was its thunder. Charred skin and bead sized boils coated her foot and ankle. Her toes were unaffected and she could wiggle them, receiving five lashes of pain for the effort. It had to be a lingering corruption, a flaw in otherwise divine mercy.
Tyrissa took in her surroundings while waiting for the pain in her foot to subside back to the dull burning. The chamber was unchanged and yet somehow less sinister. Wind whistled across the cracked ceiling as rich afternoon sunlight angled down onto the black floor tiles. Judging by the light she had been out for a few hours. Her staff, still thankfully in once piece, lay against one wall. Her pack was near the entryway, its contents spilled out on the floor. She could recall images of every second of the one-sided fight, yet couldn’t remember removing the bag or the daemon cutting it away.
She steeled herself and looked over at Tsellien’s body. A cloud of flies swarmed about the corpse, the natural processes of decay rushing in to reassert their sway. Tyrissa crawled over to her unexpected savior, eyes tearing from the waves of pain that coursed out of her foot.
Tsellien’s wore a death mask of resignation, of utter calm. With a bowed head, Tyrissa gave her a short, silent wake, the best she could do here. The buzzing cloud of flies sang the funeral dirge.
“I’m sorry,” Tyrissa said to the dead woman, as she pulled off Tsellien’s left boot and looked for anything else worth scavenging. She would need to cover her foot and eventually walk on it to get home. No one knew where she was. She would be rescued by no hands but her own and found it easier to think of it not as scavenging but as a final set of gifts, a critical, if vague difference.
Tyrissa crawled over to a nearby discarded cloak. The material was a fabric she didn’t recognize: light, soft and colored a simple gray with bright silver threads lining the edges in delicate, curling patterns. At the neck was a metal brooch bearing an emblem of a shield with four quadrants. The shield was winged with ten curving feathers, five on a side. Stamped below the emblem were a pair of runic letters in a language just as foreign as the lettering that adorned this temple, though these were graceful rather than sinister. She saw now that the same winged shield emblem adorned pieces of Tsellien’s armor, discreetly placed, hidden in plain sight. Tyrissa held the clasp tight in her hand and then threw the cloak over her shoulders.
She recovered her staff and bag next, fighting through the flares from her foot that were becoming a constant, but
ignorable, presence as she crawled across the channels of sunlight and shadow on the cathedral floor. Gritting her teeth, Tyrissa poured part of the contents of her water skin over her foot. Flecks of filth, residue of the daemon’s touch, washed away. She folded over a length of the leather strap of her bag and bit down on it, took the bandages from the bag and wrapped them around her foot. Tyrissa pulled the bandages tight and birthed a new supernova of pain, screaming through clenched teeth. She spat out the leather with a string of profanity, drank the rest of the warm water from the skin and lay back, waiting for her breath and heart to slow. Pulling on Tsellien’s boot was mild by comparison.
After repacking her now woefully insufficient supplies, Tyrissa struggled to her feet, leaning heavily on her staff as a crutch. Step by pained step she retraced her path out of the damned, unhallowed grounds of the temple. She kept her eyes down, focused on the stairs before her. This time the temple was silent, no aural tricks, no grip of hot darkness. There was only the black stone, quiet and eternally uncaring, without menace. She walked through the patches of black ash on the floor without fear, knowing she trod upon the remains of daemons slain by Tsellien and her fallen allies.
Outside, the air felt right again. Birds and insects flew above the blackened circle and midnight spire, where before the air was empty. The spire itself no longer seemed to devour the light, as if accepting its place in the natural order. Instead of relief, Tyrissa only felt a steadily building hatred for the spire, its unearthed temple, and for herself. Her luck today was only exceeded by her stupidity, her ignorant assumption she was invincible.
The descent to the valley was the worst: an extended blur of gingerly placed hand and foot holds. Tyrissa lost track of how many times she slipped or lost her grip on the way down, numb to the little scraps and cuts from the rocky ground. They were inconsequential. She’s had worse now. For the rest of her days she will always have had worse.
At the base of the hillside she found a narrow stream flowing into the valley, the water fed by the still melting snows from the Norspine peaks. She rested here, refilling the water skin and trying her best to rinse some of the blood out of her clothes, hair, and skin. Her motions were automatic, unthinking. The sun dipped toward the heights of the Norspine Mountains in its extended summer sunset. With precious few hours of light left, Tyrissa stood, wincing, and started the slow march back down the rock-strewn valley.
Will never make it home before dark. Must find shelter. Must get away from here.
Tyrissa’s mind looped through those three thoughts. This morning she was a queen of these woods, striding through the trees fearless and untouchable. Now, hobbled and stunned, she was prey, carrion. She even smelled the part.
Tyrissa found what she sought after hours of scant, agonizing progress, just as the sun began to pass behind the peaks at her back. At the center of the valley, not far from where she descended this morning, were the gutted ruins of a cluster of homes. Abandoned during the Cleanse like every other sign of human hands in the Morgwood, the ruin was little more than a ring of six overgrown foundations around a crumbling stone longhouse. Tyrissa didn’t know who lived here before leaving it to ruin, but assumed it was the home of an extended family, a common practice in the old days. Fields clear of boulders and dotted by younger trees surrounded the homestead: former farmland in the process of being reclaimed.
Relived, Tyrissa limped to the empty doorway of the central building. A strong oaken door, its red paint chipped and faded by two decades of nature’s cycles lay splintered against the opposite wall, as if violently blasted through. It was the only hint of the fate of this family’s little village, everything else burned or washed away by the march of time. The longhouse’s roof had collapsed long ago, filling the interior with rubble of rotted wood and splintered tiles, but it would be enough shelter for the night. Tonight was the peak of the aurora’s hazel phase, and the darkness would be weakened.
Through the lengthened twilight of the mountain’s shadow Tyrissa worked at clearing a space in one corner of the longhouse, enough to lie down near a small fire. The remnants of the ceiling beams, rotted as they were, would provide plenty of fuel. As she worked, she could feel a sickness building in her, seeming to radiate up from her scarred and blackened foot.
As true night descended, Tyrissa had a respectable campfire crackling along one of the remaining walls and she sat nearby in a corner, huddled within Tsellien’s cloak. Every few minutes she would toss still green lengths of pine needles onto the fire, creating a pungent smoke that she hoped would hide the lingering scent of blood. Though the night felt like it would be warm and the campfire heated her makeshift shelter, Tyrissa hugged her knees to her chest and shivered from illness. So much for wholly miraculous healing.
Her mind raced, blinking through hundreds of ideas and memories and promises, never lingering on one for more than a few seconds in a maddening babble of conscious and subconscious thoughts, the chaos and delirium of fever. Sleep came in desperate fits that were broken by a flare of pain from her foot, or worse, the distant howl of wolves. Once, she cherished that sound, wild and free. Tonight it only brought a primal terror.
In clearer stretches of thought, Tyrissa tried to remember more details of that other place. Her glimpse of the afterlife became even more clouded and indistinct, a dream of a dream. She stared into the weakening flames of the campfire and tried to concentrate, but the clearest thing she could remember was the promise, the command: Prove Yourself Worthy. She could feel it around her heart and mind, a loose binding that could grow tighter as one struggled against it. Just like the stories. That was it. The conclusion shone down, a ray of summer sunlight in the darkest midwinter night.
I agreed to a Pact.
The thought chilled her more deeply than the fever racking her body or the cool night air that crept though the fading heat of her dying campfire. She was Pactbound, a tool of elemental forces beyond the physical world, the subject of legends and horror stories, the instigators and targets of the Cleanse. Hero and Monster.
Do I even have a choice over which I’ll be?
She could have refused and remained among the dead. Yet somehow, Tyrissa did not think she even considered it, was not capable of considering it. Her memory of the exchange was now little more than an impression, a vanishing glimpse. She tried to internalize the idea, a mix of resignation and acceptance. There was no going back. So far as she knew, once you were bound by an Elemental Pact you were bound for life.
Tyrissa raised her eyes to the night sky, at the canopy of stars shining behind the aurora’s coruscating ribbons of hazel light.
“I’ll do as you ask,” she whispered.
A reply came in the form of Tyrissa’s skin breaking into a cold sweat, her fever fading. The pain in her foot dropped to a dull ache. A serene feeling washed over her as she was embraced by the arms of sleep.
Chapter Nine
Tyrissa staggered through the rows of stumps at the boundary of Edgewatch the next evening, limping up to the wall of gray stone that ringed the sheep pastures of the Grossen family. The relief of familiar sights and smells was enormous, lightening two days’ worth of hunger and pain and back-of-the-mind fears. Still, as one of the shepherds raised a cry calling for aid, Tyrissa collapsed against the rough stone wall. She was spent, too exhausted, too numb to go any further. This was enough. She made it back.
A flurry of activity and attention from neighbors followed. On came the questions and the relieved platitudes of people at a loss for words and, under it all, the suspicious whispers. Tyrissa waved away their offers of bringing her to the physic’s home.
“Rest and food,” she said. The physic would find curiously little to heal. Someone brought water. It was gone in seconds. Aside from the persistent dull ache in her foot, Tyrissa was mostly just exhausted.
Liran was the first of her family to arrive, looking like he’d slept even less than she had, his hair far from its usual neatly combed and styled state. She threw her ar
ms around him.
“Quite an entrance, dearest sister,” he said, voice glad but laced with weariness.
“Just help me home, Liran,” Tyrissa managed to say with a weak smile.
They crossed the upper green to their home, Tyrissa with one arm over Liran’s shoulders, the other using the staff as a walking stick. The steeloak weapon could splinter and disintegrate tomorrow and Tyrissa would still be satisfied with it. In the span of three days it granted her a lifetime’s worth of comfort and support. The only mistakes were her own.
Iri raced up to them in front of their house. Tyrissa blinked in surprise at her mother. She wore trousers and boots, and had the look of someone who had been tromping through the forest all day. The cloth over her eye was black. Despite all she has seen, this seemed the most unusual.
“Gods’ graces, Ty what happened to you?”
“I’m fine, mother. I look worse than—” Tyrissa was interrupted by Iri’s hands going to her cheeks. At the touch, she felt a slight surge of warmth and a flash of light at the edge of her vision. Her mother hissed in alarm and drew back sharply, her face a sudden mask of deeper, renewed worry. She wrapped one pensive hand around her necklace charm and Tyrissa could see faint, lingering glimmers of light seeping out from between her mother’s clenched fingers.
“Liran, take her inside. Get her whatever she needs. I-I’ll bring in your father and brothers from their search. We all must talk once Ty has had a chance to rest.”
The Jorensen family gathered in the living room, the dying light of sunset setting the windows afire. Oster and Sven had been sent outside, her mother deeming their ears too young for the talk to come. For a while, no one said a word. Iri paced the length of the room, alternating between spinning her charm in one hand and running her hands over her face and threading her fingers through her hair. Tyrissa sat in one of the pair of old blue chairs. Her father knelt on the floor tending her injured foot, rewrapping it in fresh bandages. With each passing hour, the wound faded and healed, though it still burned like Hell from the daemon’s touch and was difficult to walk on. How Tyrissa was able to get all the way home was becoming a blur of numbing pain and obsessive focus on placing one foot in front of the other.
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