The Wind Riders

by Kris Kramer

  Chapter 5 - Tyr

  It had taken Galen all morning to relax from the fight at Duren Olan. His hands shook for some time after leaving the outpost, and he still felt jittery, constantly looking back to see if that third Garn had decided to come after them for revenge, or just a meal. He tried his best to relax but it was no use. That encounter had been totally unexpected and wholly unwanted, especially now, and he had trouble coming to terms with why it happened at all. And not just for obvious reasons.

  Pilots, like all magic users, learned concentration exercises to help them focus when casting or chanting. A magic user with no focus is no more useful than a miner without a pick, because it’s the single-mindedness of the caster that affects the intensity and power of the spell. The only thing the crystals do is provide the spark for the magic to begin, and they affect the duration of the spell, although that can also depend on skill. But every focus exercise Galen had ever learned was of no help to him now. He was more rattled than he could ever remember. But it was more than that. He also felt vindicated. A part of him opened up when he killed that Garn, releasing a weight on his memories that had been sitting there for a decade now. The whole experience had been a small taste of vengeance for him, and he struggled with the empty sense of triumph he’d experienced in that Happaran building.

  Memories flooded back into his mind, unbidden, of sleeping in the mountains with his family after the Breaking, over ten years ago. Half his family had been lost during the Great Journey, dying from either the strain of traveling through the mountains or from disease and starvation. All that remained with him when the Anzarins drove them back into the mountains were his cousin, Gelanir, his father, his uncle and two other cousins, children of another brother who had died. They slept in a small cave that night, hiding from the cold wind that threatened to kill off the rest of them. They had little food and only a few blankets amongst them, all they could take when they were attacked. Galen managed to actually fall asleep easy that night, mostly from fatigue.

  Then that moaning sound came. It awoke Galen first, who tried to reason with himself that it was nothing to be frightened of. Then it came again, from somewhere else. He remembered the fear setting in, then the panic as he woke his father. But by then it was too late. A pack of three Garns found them, swinging their large clubs at anything that moved. Galen’s father and uncle fought as well as they could, but they stood no chance. One swing smashed his father’s head and he saw him drop to the ground, lifeless. He heard his uncle, busy grabbing the two younger cousins, yelling at him and Gelanir to run away, and they did. They turned and ran as fast as they could, stopping only for one anguished moment as they heard several cries of agony behind them.

  The two of them ran forever, until they finally collapsed from exhaustion. They found some cover from the night and the wind and waited, sure that the Garns would find them any minute, but too tired to run anymore, too dazed from the horror they’d seen to keep fighting. They fell asleep, with Galen convinced that they would never wake back up. But the worst part came when they did. They wandered the mountains for two weeks, cold and hungry, surviving on brittle plants and small bugs before they were found by chance and saved by Wind Riders who'd come west to scout. But Galen’s memory of the fear he felt that night never left him. He thought he'd gotten over it. He thought age and experience had pushed the memory away. But the moment he heard those sounds again at Duren Olan, he became a young boy again, and he remembered every terrible part of that night in excruciating detail.

  But even though he'd exacted a small price from that Garn for taking his family from him, it wasn’t enough to overcome the feelings of loss now swelling back up inside him. He never got over all the death he'd seen; he'd always been too busy running, from the White Horsemen destroying his homeland, from the Anzarins forcing them back into the mountains, from the Garns who killed his father and uncle and cousins.

  Why had this happened now? Why did he have to deal with all this again, when they were on the most important mission the Wind Riders had undertaken in over ten years? Damn Iago for leading them this way. They never would have run into to the Garns had they taken a normal path. Damn Arigin for not taking the lead and making this trip in his stead. Damn the Tyrans for their treachery and destruction. He spent years trying to put those memories behind him, and damn them all for bringing them back.