The Darkling Tide

by Travis Simmons

  Celeste plodded over to where her sister had fallen through the boundary of the trail. The snow had been blasted backwards in the light show that had issued from Daniken.

  A hand fell on Leona’s shoulder, and she jumped.

  “It’s ok,” Rorick said, pulling her close to him. She dropped the sword and clung to his waist as if he were the only thing that held her to her old life. She sobbed into his shirt, and Rorick stroked her hair.

  “It’s alright, Celeste is here. If anyone can heal Abagail, it’s her,” he soothed.

  At some point Celeste had set the rabbits to cooking over the fire, and when Leona and Rorick settled at the fire, there was no trace of loss on Celeste’s face. Leona wasn’t sure if it was a show for them, or if, once mourned, all sorrow had left the light elf.

  The sun scepter stood in the snow behind Celeste, and occasionally she cast a glance back at it.

  “Will Abagail be okay?” Rorick asked.

  “If anyone can heal her, it’s Mari,” Celeste said, which wasn’t an answer that Leona really wanted to hear. “You did what you needed to do,” Celeste told her. “You were very brave.”

  Leona nodded. She didn’t say anything, because as she was trying to think of something to say, a familiar voice came to her head that washed away all grief, all sorrow.

  The scepter is yours now, Skuld spoke to her.

  Leona closed her eyes and fresh tears painted her cheeks, but this time they were tears of happiness. Skuld, where did you go?

  Don’t worry about that now, Skuld said. Claim the scepter.

  Leona pushed to her feet, her knees weak. The scepter lay in the snow at Abagail’s feet. She tried not to look at her sister’s ashen face as she crossed the snow, and instead focused on how the snow crunched under her boots. But her eyes saw the trail of Daniken’s blood Abagail’s sword had left in the snow, and it was over.

  She looked up at her sister, hoping that maybe Abagail would be awake, but it wasn’t so. Abagail was still on the ground, the two elves crouched over her. Mari had her hands held over Abbie’s head, and Skye was watching Mari, waiting for her to need something.

  The plague had spread. Abagail’s face was a mask of black tendrils. The plague had worked its way around the back of her neck and up the other side of her face so that lashes of the plague met and twined together in the center of her face.

  Leona froze where she stood.

  She tried to pull her eyes away from Abagail, but she couldn’t.

  The scepter was just at her feet now. She wanted to ask how Abagail was, but she didn’t want to interrupt Mari and possibly hurt Abagail.

  She will be ok, Skuld said. At least, she will be if she pulls out of this. The plague hasn’t consumed her completely.

  Leona closed her eyes against the relief that flooded through her.

  Now, take the scepter.

  Leona remembered how just a few days ago she worried that she didn’t have a weapon of her own. That was still true. Despite using Abagail’s short sword, it wasn’t hers. She still didn’t have a weapon other than the knife she was carried.

  She opened her eyes, and didn’t look at her sister. Instead, her eyes traveled down to the thin, iron-like staff laying at her sister’s feet.

  The moon scepter.

  Unclaimed.

  Her fingers wrapped around its cool surface. It was heavier now than she remembered. At first, looking at it, she thought that the scepter was dead, devoid of all energy. Now that she held it, Leona could feel the slightest stirring of life within the scepter.

  What was more, the scepter called out to her, reached into her hand, and sought out her energy. It wasn’t like it had been before, the scepter didn’t try to overcome her, instead it sought to become one with her.

  When the wave of music-like energy reached her brain, Leona felt the music sync in time with her thoughts. The music changed slightly to match her own internal energy. Now as Leona listened, the music coming from the scepter wasn’t just the wild music of the moon as it had been when Daniken’s energy infused it. Now it was as if the moon was speaking directly to her soul.

  Leona pulled her mind away from the scepter, and carried it back to camp. The fire crackled with warmth and vitality when she sat down.

  “Abagail isn’t completely consumed yet,” Leona said by way of breaking the silence.

  “No, she has a long way to go before that happens. I was hoping to get her to the harbingers before she got this far...” Celeste looked up at the scepter Leona held, but didn’t comment.

  “What is the plan?” Rorick wondered. “Can we go back?”

  “No,” Celeste told him. “The forest fire has slowed, but Daniken was right earlier when she said that it was still there. We wouldn’t make it through the fire. We have to press on.”

  “To the Frozen North?” Leona asked.

  “The frost giants live there,” Celeste said. “With any luck, we won’t catch their eye and can slip around the edge of the forest. It will be a couple week’s travel around the Fay Forest to New Landanten. We won’t have the coverage of Singer’s Trail either. It will be rough.”

  “We can make it,” Rorick said.

  Leona didn’t respond.

  “We don’t have time to wait for Abagail to get better,” Celeste told them. “After we’ve regained our strength, we need to head out and carry her with us.”

  Leona remembered the golden cloud Celeste had floated Abagail on earlier and figured it made sense. Even if the fire had slowed, it would still be coming their way.

  They were silent for several moments in which Mari could be heard muttering something to herself, whether an incantation or a prayer, Leona wasn’t sure.

  “You need to charge that,” Celeste told her, nodding to the scepter in Leona’s hands.

  “In the light of the full moon?” Leona asked.

  Celeste nodded. “It’s bound to you now. Since Daniken is dead, the next person to touch it becomes its wielder. That only works if the scepter has been opened.”

  “She said she would get me a scepter of my own when she taught me to use it,” Leona confessed. “I never thought it would be hers.”

  “Daniken probably didn’t think it would be hers either,” Celeste said. “Looking back on it now, I imagine she thought the scepter you would come to control would be mine. I shouldn’t have let her get in on the warding we were doing with Abagail.”

  “You can’t change that now,” Rorick said.

  Celeste nodded.

  Daphne landed on the elf’s shoulder and she must have said something because Celeste smiled a sad smile. She nodded in agreement with the pixie and handed out the rabbits.

  “Now we eat. Tomorrow will be soon enough for traveling and thinking about the road ahead.” Celeste told them. She pulled a packet of seeds and nuts out of her pocket and opened it. “We are still in danger. Abagail is a harbinger unclaimed and that will call all kinds of trouble to us.”

  Leona didn’t want to think about tomorrow. She ate little of the meat since it turned her stomach to eat anything. Before long she was laying down near the fire.

  Once she thought they were asleep, Celeste gathered her sun scepter to herself and looked deep into its crystalline depths. She took a deep, shuddering breath. She looked up at the moon, nearly full now, and Leona could see tears standing out in the elf’s clear blue eyes.

  And then she fell asleep.

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  FLIP THE PAGE FOR A SNEAK PEAK OF BOOK 3 A LAMENT OF MOONLIGHT

  Dolan felt the surface of the mirr
or slip over his face like a cool sheet of water. No matter how many times he stepped through the mirror, he would never tire of the way it eased his muscles and cleared the worry from his mind.

  He hadn’t traveled through the mirror in some time, because he was being hunted by Heimdall and the other gods for the alleged theft of the god slayer. But he’d made a promise to his daughters, and he intended on keeping that promise. By now they would have found their way to Agaranth, and he could do what he needed to do.

  He tried not to think of the way the shadow plague had taken his oldest daughter Abagail, and he tried not to think about how his youngest daughter, Leona would cope in a world without him. She was too young—and she acted younger—to be facing such hardships.

  Dolan didn’t have to try hard to keep his daughters from his mind because no sooner had he stepped through the mirror than a familiar sight greeted him.

  Heimdall was tall and lithe with blond hair that was frosted from his time out in the cold of the cosmos. His skin was milky, like alabaster, and touched by the same chill that colored his hair. The God of the Crossroads shimmered with frost from his bare feet to his head. Around his waist he wore a simple white wrap held up by a leather belt inscribed with runes burnt into the surface.

  On the belt hung the horn of winter.

  Dolan’s eyes lingered on the horn. It was the same one that Heimdall would use in the end times to signal the start of Ragnarok. Dolan shivered and closed his eyes. He didn’t like to think of the days when the frost giants and fire giants and demons from the underworld would converge on Eget Row.

  “Olik, we’ve been looking all over for you,” Heimdall said. His voice, while soft and welcoming, held a kind of terrible power that made Dolan shiver. “You took something that belongs to Hafaress.”

  “Have you had to use the horn yet?” Dolan said, trying to ignore the name he was given at his creation.

  Heimdall shook his head. He shifted his weight on his feet and the movement caused the opalescent cobbled road of Eget Row to shimmer in rainbow light. “You would know if I had used it. All the nine worlds would know.”

  “Then I didn’t take it in vein. It passed by here some time ago,” Dolan said.

  “The only thing that’s passed here were two girls and a boy, heading for Mattelyn Bauer’s hall,” Heimdall said. Understanding alighted in his blue eyes. “You concealed it well.” It was as near a compliment as one was likely to get from Heimdall.

  “So you are going to imprison me now?” Dolan asked.

  “On the contrary, I need your help.” Heimdall gestured wide with his hand and a stairway of radiant light sprung up before them. Together they started climbing the stairway to the Ever After. It had been too long since his feet had touched the landscape of his ancestral home. Dolan had put himself in exile some time past, knowing that he had to keep the God Slayer out of Eget Row for the safety of all the nine worlds.

  “Why did you take it?” Heimdall asked, as if reading his mind.

  “The Tree and the nine worlds would never be safe while the God Slayer stayed with Hafaress,” Dolan said. “Or rather, while it resided in Eget Row. The harbingers of darkness have been looking for ways to seize it, destroy the gods, and place themselves back in the Ever After. Hafaress was too curious for his own good. At some point, he was going to lose it.”

  Heimdall nodded, a smile of understanding ghosting across his face.

  As they climbed, the rainbow bridge beneath them faded into darkness, and above them the song of the Ever After wafted down to their ears. It was a song that made Dolan feel like he could fly.

  “And what is it you need my help with?” Dolan asked.

  “The All Father has been missing for some time,” Heimdall said as they crested the top of the stairs. The light billowed away from them in a luminous cloud to reveal a large kingdom of white stone. Minarets spiraled up into the pristine darkness above the Ever After. The parapets were empty, no indication that before thousands of feet would tread along their winding paths through the upper reaches of the great castle. Normally the Ever After was bustling with activity, songs, and praise rising high into the air. The desolation around the Ever After was haunting. Nothing moved except the light and the resonant sound the light created when it crested the stone walls. Heimdall gestured, and Dolan felt a buoyancy around him as they began floating to one of the highest peaks of the castle. “Hafaress went looking for him, and I haven’t seen him since. It was only today that I realized Vilda has also gone missing.”

  “All of the gods? They’re gone?” Dolan asked, his face wild with disbelief.

  Heimdall nodded.

  “What was Vilda’s reason for leaving?” Dolan asked.

  “I don’t think there was a reason for her leaving,” Heimdall shrugged. “Or if there was, it wasn’t any reason I was aware of.” Together they stepped through an arched window and into a spacious room. The walls were hung with white sheer fabric that reminded Dolan of mist, and all around the floor were cushions and pillows for lounging. On the wall hung a mirror similar to the black one Dolan kept in his home.

  But this mirror had been smashed, and all around it on the white flagstone walls the shadows that were kept inside the glass splayed out like reaching tendrils of night.

  “So, she just vanished without reason?” Dolan asked, stepping nearer the mirror. He expected to see through the wall to the white light that existed everywhere in the Ever After. Instead, he saw was a long tunnel of darkness. It wasn’t anything Dolan was expecting, and the darkness within the Ever After chilled him to the bone. He stepped away from the shattered mirror, an unexplainable uneasiness gripping his stomach.

  “You’ve never trusted her since the rest of her brood turned bad,” Heimdall said to Dolan.

  “With good reason. They aren’t just bad, but the three of them: Hilda, Gorjugan, and Anthros will see the nine worlds destroyed.”

  “Some might say the same of you, Olik, birth golem of Hafaress.”

  Dolan stopped short. Was that all he was? Afterbirth wyrded to life so the Light of the Waking Eye, Hafaress, could have a playmate. That’s all most people saw Hilda, Gorjugan and Anthros as. After all, they were wyrded from Vilda’s afterbirth as playmates for the goddess.

  “You stole the God Slayer away, secreted it in O all this time, and now it is loose in the world. It had been safe here in the Ever After. One might say you’re the true reason the darklings are invading the nine worlds.” Heimdall crossed his frost-kissed arms over his chest. “You could very well be the reason for Ragnarok. Trying to avert it, you may have made it inevitable.”

  “Then that person would be wrong.”

  “All of the gods have now left the Ever After,” Heimdall said, staring through the hole in the wall. Shadows clung to the edges of the ruined bricks like soot from a raging fire.

  “Where have they gone?” Dolan wondered to himself.

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  About Travis

  Travis Simmons was kicked out of magic school for his refusal to study and his penchant for mundane activities like cooking. While selling his sword he stumbled upon dogs that he wrongly thought were magical and imagined he could commune with them. After a vicious zombie attack in which witches helped him push back the undead horde, Travis found himself apprenticed to a necromancer.

  Afraid that winter was coming, Travis tucked into his magical studies, but always chased his dreams of writing tales science fiction tales and fantasy stories where he could explore his wild imagination about life on other planets. Adamant that Travis learn the esoteric ways of the occult his master made his life a horror of practice and studies. But no matter how he tried, he could never conquer Travis' questing mind.

 

 

 
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