Angelica watched in amazement, the worry of her fallen brother melting away as soft silver light began to grow at the joint of wings and body. The light traced its way along the edges of each feather until they were all ringed with silver luminescence. Finally the light grew in intensity, so concentrated that they all shielded their eyes.
Elven eyes, however, were much stronger than human ones so there was no need for Lockelayter to protect his eyes, and so he watched the transformation take place. The nependier bent its head down to rest its horn to Jovian’s forehead. The light extended from the horn and through the man’s body tracing across each line and crack in the skin, each break of flesh, each protrusion of bone until both creature and human shone with a light that was completely ethereal.
Fingers became whole once more, no longer a ruined mess of lumps and blood. His skin softened, moistened, and mended back together. His hair grew once more, as did the beard that had been there before the lightning strike. All traces of blood and death raced from his body leaving a shockingly beautiful being laying on the table, no longer in his final sleep, but instead in a deep restful sleep.
Lockelayter studied the soft cream of Jovian’s skin, no longer charred and cracked, the natural blush of his cheeks, the pale curve of lush lips, and sharp bridge of a previously broken nose. His soft blond hair lay in lank curls around his head, not the shriveled mess it had been. Under his soft lids eyes danced in the midst of dreams, now renewed and pleasant in this place where harm could not touch body or mind.
He looked to the creature, wondering why it had interfered where they had never interfered before. The nependier nodded once, closed its wings, and turned away from them all.
Angelica watched the creature retreat with awe. She had expected it would bring Jovian back from death but she had not expected it would remake him anew.
Tears once more graced her cheeks, but this time not from sadness; this time from happiness and relief. Everything seemed good and right once more. She reached down and took one of Jovian’s smooth hands in her own and touched his soft hair with the other.
Deep in his sleep, Jovian moaned and shifted his head.
As Angelica was joined by the rest of her friends, the elves backed away into the trees once more, leaving Lockelayter with the group. Angelica began to weep openly holding her brother’s hand close to her heart.
It took three days for Jovian to return to the waking world. Three days of constant vigils were held by Maeven and Angelica. The elves that attended him were much different from those they saw the night when they first entered Whitewood Haven. Angelica began to see them as a very fun loving race that could be stern when need called for it, but most certainly not choosing to be so all the time.
Jovian was washed and tended to each day, his face shaved by Maeven, as the elves, having no body hair anywhere on their body, didn’t know how to properly shave a face, and his body clothed in a soft white wrap much like the garb the male elves wore. In fact, they all now wore such clothing. Maeven looked out of place with his dusting of chest and stomach hair in a sea of smooth skin.
Jovian had not been moved from his spot, and so neither did Maeven and Angelica, only when bathing and dressing required it. Even eating and sleeping were carried out at Jovian’s bedside, and those were the only times either of them let go of his hands. They feared the longer they left contact with him the further he would slip away, as if their hands in his would keep him from death’s pallor.
During this time Joya and Grace took advantage of the wooded walks and admired the scenery. Joya, it seemed, had been reading the herbal book she had been gifted, and she was taking a keen interest in herbal lore and remedies. Grace was happy to show her the walks on the Mountains of Nependier that held some of the rarest herbs in all the Great Realms.
Grace and Joya basked in the warm sun as they picked their way through the herbal fields not far from Whitewood haven. There was no trace of a breeze, and Joya could hear birds chattering overhead amid clouds close enough she could almost touch.
Rich scents of lavender, rose, and patchouli accosted Joya’s nose. Buzzing bees gathered the nectar from the herbs, and the noise reminded Joya of summertime at home. No matter what had happened the last few days, Joya felt all of her cares and worries melt away.
Grace had just finished lecturing her about the many uses of mugwort and now they meandered lazily through the fields. Finally Joya sighed heavily, and the old lady slowed to a stop and looked over at her.
“What is it, child?” Grace asked, concerned.
“Well, after what happened I have many questions, many concerns.”
Grace’s eyebrows knitted together. The old Joya would have been upset at having so many things kept from her. It could have been the wyrd of the mountains, or it could have been a mark of her recent forced maturity which held the temper at bay.
Grace lowered herself on a boulder. “I imagine you do. I cannot, however, tell you the tale and the secrets now. That will be a much longer conversation that we will have as soon as your brother regains his health. The dwarves of Dellenbore know I am here, and I am sure I will not be able to escape a meeting with them. I have planned to tell you the tale there.” She looked up at the raven-haired girl with worried eyes. “Joya, you must know that I had no intention of keeping things from you for so long, but it just seemed I had no choice.” She sighed again.
Joya nodded, not knowing what to say. She neither knew what the old woman had been keeping from them, or how intense the secrets were. There was one thing she did know, if Grace was not ready to tell her then Grace was most certainly not going to tell her.
It was while the two of them were out voyaging through the fields that Jovian came to himself with a stir, a yawn, and then a long languid stretch as if he had gone through nothing more than the most peaceful night’s sleep he had ever had. Angelica guessed that dying and being resurrected would truly rest one’s soul like nothing else could.
So it was that Jovian was fully roused by several voices and sets of hands upon him. Angelica immediately wrapped him in her weeping embrace, planting several kisses all over his face, a process which took several minutes. Jovian collected himself at the sound of Angelica’s pleas and gentle threats, saying, “If you ever do that again I will bring you back just so I can kill you myself,” and “I was so afraid you were gone forever.”
After Angelica pried herself away, Maeven planted a firm kiss on his lips and took Jovian into his warm, strong embrace. It felt good to be enclosed in the other man’s warmth once more, and Jovian sighed, and then inhaled his musky, woodsy scent. When Maeven moved, it left Jovian stunned at the sight of so many elves (creatures he had never before seen) stepping hesitantly toward him. Their glimmering gold skin, multi-hued brown hair, and oddly colored eyes shocked him into a silence more absolute than the death he had just come from.
The oddity of the situation was only made worse when the elves finally reached Jovian and began sniffing him all over, their faces plunging here and there, even places that would make any normal person blush at the audacity of the race’s curiosity. Maeven could have told him that this was the way the elves came to know a person, for they didn’t recognize faces and names but instead they recognized the smell and the sound of a person. Jovian was the last to get the odd treatment.
“Jovian,” Angelica said. “Something strange is happening.”
“I must agree, Angie, something strange is definitely happening.” She scowled at him, not sure what he meant, but Maeven—red-cheeked with embarrassment—looked down at Jovian, then averted his eyes. Angelica shook her head disapprovingly still unsure what he meant, and continued.
“I mean with this whole journey, the heirloom, your sword, that woman named Porillon.” At the mention of the woman’s name, hate swelled up in Angelica and her palms began to prickle. She had to forcibly push the emotion aside as the memory of Lockelayters warning came to her. “I have a really odd feeling.”
“Yeah, m
e too,” he said with another laugh, gesturing to the elves. Angelica finally understood what he meant and scoffed.
“When you are done enjoying your sniffing, meet me over by the fire.”
He did, about ten minutes later, supported by Maeven who lowered him on a rock beside his sister then sat, taking Jovian’s hand once more.
“Where are the others?” Jovian asked rubbing his head.
Angelica was silent for a moment as she watched the crackling fire. “Grace and Joya have gone out hunting for the flowering five-fingered grass. I guess it is sacred to them.”
Jovian smiled. “Yeah, I bet it is.”
Angelica looked at him with piercing eyes, a remnant of the sorceresses name bitter on her tongue. “Do you remember anything of what happened?”
Jovian considered a moment before he spoke. Plucking at the grass and finding a long strand, he stuck it between his teeth and began chewing on it. “Yes, I remember Amber not being able to come with us, and then that woman Grace knew attacked us.”
Angelica shook her head. “She also spoke of the necklace, and of your sword. Jovian. Both of them were mother’s, and both of them seem to have unexplained powers. There is something going on, and we are not being told the whole story.”
Jovian looked back to the fire, worrying his lip, and he tossed a handful of grass into it. “Do you think Grace is keeping something from us like that woman said?”
“She admitted it the other night to me. She didn’t tell me anything of what she knew, but she did say that we would talk about it all when you were back with us.”
“Well then I guess there is no more of her dodging around things, is there?”
Angelica nodded once and smiled at the crackling fire as Maeven left to get Jovian some much needed food.
The ancient stone steps that ran down into the underground city of Dellenbore were surrounded by a large arched tunnel lined with torches in metal sconces. The descent into the mine city did not start in the side of the Mountains of Nependier, but instead started in a small cave at the edge of Whitewood Haven, still within the embrace of the bleached trees. If they had not been shown the way to the dank entrance, Jovian would never have known it was there. At one time he was looking at a large, moss covered bolder; the next thing he saw were vines and ivy being parted by elven hands to reveal the entrance that both crackled with the flames of the torches and tinkled with the sound of dripping water.
The stairs descended in a square pattern that Jovian thought should have been in ill repair due to the length of time the stairs must have been there, but instead appeared to have been carved scant days before. No slime or moss covered the stairs, which was shocking due to the fact moisture clung to the walls and ceiling. Treading the path down into the dwarven city, Jovian felt like he was going back to the Otherworld as he had done the night Angelica and him had stopped the winds. Now he wasn’t sure that place was even real. He wasn’t sure there was anything mystical laying on the other side of life.
Though Jovian had been dead, he remembered nothing of it. He was sure there was something there, something he had experienced, but he could not call the vision to mind. It was not for him like it was for others. He could not remember seeing any of the harbingers of death, nor could he see the Three Wisdoms that often came during one’s Darkest Hour. This was the time in which most people always came back from death if they were going to return. After the initial hour people never returned. It was a miracle in itself that Jovian had done so.
Yet there was something he did remember: a woman black as night, and a white horse.
What had he seen? He could not stop thinking about it. If he was dead for that length of time, what had happened? Had he floated in oblivion? Had he traveled to the Black Gates of the Otherworld? Had he been admitted to the Ever After? He didn’t know. Had he simply not existed? Was there no life outside of the living vessel his soul inhabited? It was the first time Jovian’s thoughts had drifted near heresy of the teaching of the Carloso and the votaries that upheld its words.
He then wondered how someone could have such blind faith. Jovian had never been a faithful man; he had never been devote like Angelica was. He had believed and attended rituals marking the Goddess’s life, but he had never been religious. He wondered now if he had ever truly believed in a higher power. It seemed that his lack of knowing what happened after his death were in stark contradiction to what he had felt the night of High Summer with all the Goddess energy running through him. Had it truly been Goddess energy, or had it simply been the overwhelming emotion from other blind believers?
The thoughts running through his head concerned him, worried him. If there was nothing to go to once one died, what was there? He truly couldn’t remember anything after the black lady and the horse. It was like once seeing her, there was nothing. He had gone from seeing her to waking up on the stone table in Whitewood Haven. It was as if he had only closed his eyes for an instant, yet in that instant he had been moved many leagues into the Mountains of Nependier. The distance his body had traveled was the only testimony that he had been absent from the living world for more than a few seconds.
An end to the stairway pulled him away from his contemplations and Jovian exited the stairwell onto a stone colonnade that surrounded the entire top of the city like a balcony peering down from the heavens into any normal habitat. A balcony so large, surrounding a city so massive that Jovian could not see the other side even from his bird’s-eye view. Yet the way the buildings disappeared in the distance and the curve of the colonnade promised more than his human eyes could see. He wondered if the elves would have been able to see further than he could.
The flickering light of the stairwell was nothing compared to the warm glow of torches below that gave light to the entire city instead of the sun. Jovian realized, however, upon looking up that the dwarves did have a source of natural light. High above the gigantic sprawling city was a crystal roof as clear as glass. The crystal roof, it appeared, was the bottom of Lake Nependier reminiscent of the roof over the capital city of the Realm of Water. The effect was to make Dellenbore appear underwater.
Each house had been tunneled into rock walls, the house fronts carved from the rock face—a door decorated with strange twisting symbols. Each house bore a roofed deck held up by columns. To either side of every door hung or rested planters filled with marigolds, and it was strange to Jovian that flowers and trees could grow in such a place, but as he looked around he saw there were gardens and parks of flowering bushes, trees, and various other plants. As he named some of them, he noticed the scent filling the air, and the petals drifting around on drafts filling the streets with soft white beauty, were from several plumb trees planted here and there. The petals reminded him of snow as they glided on the air.
Looking closer, he could see the fish swimming in the Lake Nependier above were mirrored by the fish swimming in the streams that ran down the center of each street inside artfully crafted medians whose walls were wide enough on either side to second as street benches.
Jovian couldn’t understand how anyone could live without sunlight. This thought was immediately chased by another and he wondered how the whole country of the Shadow Realm was able to survive being forsaken by any light of any kind. But still, there were plants that grew here. Jovian looked at the thick black vines that worked their way down every wall, heavy with purple fruit. He wondered if the Shadow Realm had such plants that only grew there.
“What in the world?” Joya stepped to the half-wall surrounding the colonnade they stood on.
“Welcome to Dellenbore, home of the dwarves of Nependier.” Grace motioned to the city.
“What is that strange fruit?” Angelica asked.
“They call it palisum. It is sacred to the dwarves and only grows here.” Grace fell silent and they all watched the dwarves below going about their daily business. Just like life in any normal city, Jovian thought, wondering why he would think life would be so different for dwarves than it woul
d be for everyone else.
“Come, they will be waiting for us,” Grace motioned for them to follow her around the colonnade a ways before stairs sloped down leading them to the main street.
Once in the stone street, Jovian looked to his right, away from where Grace was leading them. The road that way seemed to be busier and warmer than most. Noise could be heard coming from that direction, a strange metallic ringing and roaring as if produced from gigantic forges.
“What is that?” Jovian asked. A warm breeze issued from the direction in question.
“That leads to the White Mines; that is where they mine ivory. It is not the way we go, and I think if you turn around you might find what Angelica and Joya are speechless about.” Sure enough, as Jovian turned around and looked down the street he saw a massive statue looming over them. When they were on top of the colonnade it had been hidden from sight, but now he looked on the large sculpture with awe.
“Who’s it of?” Joya asked as she took in the sight of the dwarf in long flowing robes with flowers both carved and real about his feet. In his cupped palms a single flame licked the air fluttering in the warm breeze from the mines at the extreme opposite of the city. An altar had been set up some time ago, overflowing with marigolds, candles, and a pitcher of what Jovian imagined to be wine.
“That’s Dungan Steelbender, isn’t it?” Angelica asked, always having a mind for religion. “He’s the God of the dwarves. It was said he could shape steel into beautiful relief with nothing more than his bare hands.”
“The one and only Dungan Steelbender,” Grace started out as if they were back at the plantation in her classroom and the statue was nothing more than a painting on the wall in which they observed. “The pitcher is filled with palisum wine, the sacred wine of Dungan Steelbender, and the marigolds were his favorite flower. Now they are considered sacred.”
“Why does he have fire in his hands?” Joya asked.
The Mirror of the Moon (Revenant Wyrd Book 2) Page 2
