The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  “Then your fire is not the same,” Shadow said to herself, watching Myriel as she regained her feet.

  The Shadow King blinked like a flickering lantern, the blood turning to gray smoke as it dried against her skin. Her eyes flashed from blue to red and white, alternating between them, and her form shook as she tried to shake off the effects.

  She looked up as the others did to see Linn beginning to fall.

  Shadow could tell the Sage girl was exhausted by the sagging of her shoulders, and by the quieting complaints of the stormy skies above.

  Myriel straightened and watched her fall, heedless of the other Landkist close by. The Ember did not take kindly to that, and as Ve’Ran struck the ground a bit harder than she had likely intended, the spear-wielder charged back into the fray, Myriel choosing not to meet her until the last possible moment, her eyes tracking Ve’Ran all the while. She dodged as the burning spear split the ground on which she’d been standing, and on the next slash, she caught the Ember by each wrist, and sent her energy into her.

  Shadow thought the red-haired warrior would collapse in a twitching heap. Instead, she gritted her teeth and screamed, and flared her spear bright and hot enough to send Myriel dancing back. The Ember fell to her knees, but caught herself from going over with the glowing butt of her Everwood spear. The hulking Rockbled moved in to bolster her.

  “Shadow.”

  The tone with which he spoke told her he hadn’t said it only once. She swung her head toward the Eastern Dark. He still held the Witch in his twin gaze, but he spoke to Shadow.

  “Reyna is down,” he said. The words seemed to have no effect on the Frostfire Sage, and Shadow wondered if she had even bothered to learn her newest champions’ names. “Get him.”

  Shadow nearly sighed. Either the Eastern Dark knew he couldn’t win this fight, or didn’t want to risk finding out.

  “Now.”

  Shadow stuck her tongue out the way a child might. She knew he hated it just as she knew he only pretended not to see. The rest of them were locked in their own bitter, wanting stares. Killing stares.

  “Some audience.”

  Shadow melted away, slipping back into the darkness of the gap. She tasted ash in the east, and blood. Hot, burning blood. Hero’s blood.

  Linn felt the cold now as she hadn’t before. She felt the moisture in the sky, which had grown milky under the looming presence of the storm she had called in. This one had been a ways off. The skies in the north were dry. She had to reach higher and farther than above the wet leaves and sodden bark of Center, and pulling it in had required more effort than she could recall having spent before.

  She managed to call up enough wind from the surrounding atmosphere to slow her fall, but she knew that her crooked, halting path to the ground must look chaotic to those below. Uncontrolled. Vulnerable.

  The glowing blue beast Baas and Misha fought stood a short distance from them, staring up from the frozen plateau. Staring at Linn, like a hunting cat watching a spiraling hawk with a broken wing.

  Linn hit the ground with her heels, gritted her teeth against the shock of it and could not keep from being driven to her knees. She flattened one palm on the ground as she let her shroud of wind leave her, trailing salt and pebbles of frost across the surface of the blue glass. She watched the one known as Myriel closely.

  The otherworldly warrior stood up straight. She now bore a dark scar that ran from the top of her right shoulder up to her neck before settling in the hollow beneath her flashing white eye, which now seemed tight. Her form buzzed. There was a faint blurring effect around her, as if her skin was vibrating like the wings of a hummingbird, or a wasp.

  She reminded Linn of the Landkist. Of Misha, Baas and their ilk. But there was something different about her. Something apart from her strange, armored appearance. She looked more wild than the Faey and more sinuous than a human, but there was an animal fierceness to her features and a feline grace to her movements. Her power—however much it looked like it was born of the lightning—could not be, as Linn’s own bolt had nearly killed her.

  Linn swallowed as the implications washed over her. She had not stopped to consider what would happen to her if she let that sparking blue energy flood her veins. She supposed there would be no wielding it. No redirecting it and guiding it on its raging, torrid path through her bones. She did not have the hot, vibrant blood of Misha nor the durability of Baas. One strike from Myriel of the World Apart, and Linn would likely die.

  Which reminded her of the two figures atop the shelf none of them could afford to ignore.

  Linn turned her head from south to northeast, doing her best to keep Myriel at the edges. She looked over the stiff, mangled form of the other warrior—the green one known as Martyr—and saw that the Sages still stood in much the same positions she had last seen them in, staring, considering, locked in some private reunion as their allies fought and died around them for causes only partially known.

  As she watched, she saw the queen’s shoulders bobbing before she heard the wind of the gathered storm sweep the laughter back toward her. The Eastern Dark only watched from the slow-changing shell of T’Alon Rane, unmoving and unamused.

  “I think that you were more potent when last I fought you,” Elanil said, though Linn saw that she took a few steps back from the edge of the chasm, one amber eye and one purple tracking her all the while. “And I less.”

  She shot her right hand forward, that silver half-gauntlet lighting up blue. All sound bled from the world for a brief moment, and then the beam of frostfire shot forth, screaming across the gap toward her adversary faster than Linn’s jagged bolts could do.

  The Eastern Dark moved before the beam was made, but he only stepped to the side far enough to spare his arm, but close enough to feel its effects. He watched the blue-white river of power shoot past him and tracked it as it fought with the sun’s light in the far east. Rather than pull the beam toward him, Elanil let it go, cutting it off, and the gloom of the storm once more covered the plateaus on either side of the gap. In the distance, the beam became a winking star in the daylight.

  “Is there any of him left?” Elanil asked. She still held her hand out, palm smoking. She regarded the Eastern Dark, who turned back to meet her gaze, both looking as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

  “Ember king,” Elanil called in a mock voice. “Are you at home? Has the Sage finally taken the rest of you?”

  Elanil lowered her hand and squared herself to face him head on once more. “I wonder why you did it,” she said. She sounded curious, and she sounded cunning. “Why, why? Oh, Ray Valour, dark star of the east. Why have you taken the Ember’s form?”

  She turned and fixed her strange, bright golden eyes on Linn and then swept them to the south, glancing half-heartedly at the standoff between the blinking, buzzing Myriel and the Landkist as if nothing could bore her more. Linn was beginning to hate her.

  “Did something happen, I wonder?”

  She turned around, meeting the Eastern Dark’s glowing, mismatched eyes once more. “Did something happen to you, prince of darkness, that you did not foresee?”

  Up came the other hand and out charged another beam, and no matter how many times she did it, Linn still had to blink away the effects of its glow. This one nearly hit, but Valour managed to leap above it. A piece of the beam clipped the top edge of the plateau on the other side of the gap, and where it struck, shards of ice—Nevermelt, more likely—sprouted like crystal flowers.

  “Why do you run?”

  Linn shook her head, not understanding what the Frostfire Sage was playing at. The Eastern Dark’s demeanor had shifted. Now, he stood on bent legs, as if he expected another attack to come at any instant. Linn wondered why he did not fight back.

  “Surely you could turn it back,” Elanil continued. “My power is greater than the last time we met—”

 
“I have no doubt as to why that may be,” the other Sage interrupted. Linn still found it strange to listen to him. His face and lips matched Rane’s, but his voice could not have been further from the Ember king’s.

  Elanil ignored him. “No,” she said. “No. I do not think it is my power you fear.”

  “There is power here, Elanil,” he said, voice level and without a hint of boasting. “More than you know. You will see it, yet.”

  “But it is not yours, is it, sweet brother? Could it be that you have joined in with the rest of us? Could it be that your power is now very much the same as ours?”

  “Not many of you left to join.”

  “You’ve done a good job of that,” Elanil admitted. “Still, the old Valour would have laughed in the face of my sorry attempts. He’d have accepted the blast and turned it back. That was your trick. That was your great and impregnable shield, and the reason why the rest of us—your hunted brethren—ever suffered you to live after you set the world on its path to ruin. Now … you run. You dip and dodge. You threaten with power, and not the unmaking of mine.”

  “I am changed, Elanil,” the Eastern Dark said, voice grave. “But do not mistake things. This form holds power you cannot imagine, and I have begun to realize it, to mix it with my own.”

  “I have fought the King of Ember once before.”

  The queen’s voice changed. It was only for a moment, but Linn detected a simmering rage there, like a thin veneer of control resting over a brittle shell. She was in the past, now, and she did not think the Eastern Dark would follow her there.

  “You fought him,” the other one nodded, “and it didn’t go well for you then. It most certainly won’t now.” He lifted one hand at his side, turning his palm up. His hand began to glow, and Linn expected a ball of flame to appear in the center. Instead, a globe of darkness bordered in red sprouted. The red turned to amber, flickering like a lantern, and while the sphere was bright, it seemed to steal the light around it, drenching the space around the Eastern Dark in his namesake. It was like an eclipse held in the palm of his hand, and as Linn watched, the ball began to lose its shape, the blackness running like ink and the fire leaking out in tiny serpents’ tongues that grew taller, licking at his palm and curling around his fingers.

  Elanil did not laugh this time. Instead, she took another step back, lowering her hands to her sides, clenching and unclenching her fists. Linn could see the muscles of her cheek and jaw tensing. She felt the air change. Her clouds had begun to break apart, admitting more of the day’s light, but the space around the gap by which the Sages stood seemed darker still.

  “He took my beloved from me,” Elanil said. “Just as I took his.”

  Valour opened his other palm and called up another torch of shadowfire. It was hypnotizing to look upon, and Linn both wished and feared to see what it would look like when unleashed, and what it would do to anything that stood in its path.

  “Does he miss her?” Elanil asked, and Linn saw Valour wince. His purple eye lost some of its color for an instant, enough to admit a hint of the amber that the other showed. “Ask him, brother. Ask him if he misses little Resh. Brave little Resh, who fell so far.”

  “He does.” Before Elanil could rise to it, he continued. “No doubt it gave him some pleasure to burn Galeveth away.”

  Linn was blown backward by the force of the queen’s silent rage. A blast of freezing air hit her and sent her tumbling over the ice. She came up dazed, looking through watering eyes at the queen’s back. Her white hair whipped behind her and her voice lost all measure of calm. It sounded wrathful and ruinous.

  “Over a dozen Landkist you sent against us,” Elanil screamed, “and only one with real bite. Now, here he stands. My dark and glowing prize. My embodied revenge, neatly packaged, delivered to my door. What sort of fool are you, Ray Valour, to bring him here?”

  The queen’s entire form began to emit a ghostly light while the Eastern Dark’s drank in the surrounding bright.

  “No games, Valour,” Elanil shouted.

  “We can still stop this,” he responded, his voice a growl as he fought to maintain the frightful power gathered above the surface of his palms. Linn saw his boots beginning to sink into the splintering ice below. He was growing heavier, the shadowfire he gripped proving too strong to contain for much longer. “We can undo whatever it is you’ve done, Elanil. It isn’t too late to turn it back.”

  “Power invites challenge,” she said. “It is a bright torch against the night. I didn’t believe you at the time. I didn’t listen. None of us did. But you were right. The coming of the World Apart was inevitable, and the only way to beat it is to use it. Power invites challenge, and the only thing that can stop it is greater power. I found mind, as you did.”

  “You have been deceived,” Valour cried. “Just as I was! You have seen what you were intended to see. Whatever end you think you’ll have, I promise you it will not come.”

  He shouted over the raging currents of wind and something else. Raw power, untamed and flowing. Linn couldn’t see it, but it was beginning to distort everything. The very fabric of the air shifted. The light began to bend inward, to split and refract. She could see it. She could see it all with her eagle’s eyes. Here, in their small pocket of being, reality was beginning to break.

  “You choose fear at the wrong time, Valour,” Elanil said, sounding disgusted. “You were boldest when it didn’t suit you. Now, I have found something you have not in those dark depths. I have found it.”

  What?

  Linn wanted to ask it, and the Eastern Dark’s eyes widened and lost their unmatched glow for a breath.

  “Yes,” Elanil said to his questioning, horrified stare. “I have found the key to immortality. The power to reverse death, to remake life. Not by calling Corrupted shells as the Night Lords have. As Uhtren did when you changed him—”

  “I did not—”

  “I have found it, and I will not stop until Galeveth walks among us once more.”

  Linn pictured the fair-haired and alabaster-skinned prince in his stone chamber beneath the palace. She pictured his eyes opening, pictured blackness in the place of golden irises.

  “He will know what to do.”

  “You fool!” Valour screamed, his voice breaking apart on the currents.

  “No more games, now,” Elanil said, her hands twitching, whole body shaking with power. “No more running. Let us decide who is right and who is wrong, the way you always wanted.”

  There was another voice on the wind. Linn’s head was throbbing and her ears ringing, but her instincts pulled her to the south.

  She saw the orange glow of Misha’s spear bathing the pitted surface of Baas’s shield as the Ember flared and ran toward her. In front of them both was a blue blur that came clearer, and Linn’s heart leapt into her throat as she saw the blue streak that was Myriel racing toward her with doom in her fists. The ice broke away where her blinding feet struck, and the air cracked where she passed it.

  Linn did not have time nor energy to summon another blast from the skies. She didn’t have time to aim a current of wind toward her attacker. Instead, she did the only thing she could spare a thought to, and pressed her palms down, squeezed her eyes shut tight and called down as much of the sky as she could. It felt like having an ocean collapse upon her, but the air responded, the wind buffeting her back and striking the cold surface below her hard enough to sweep it clean.

  The force of the blast created a wall of wind that slowed Myriel just enough, but sent Linn skyward. Instead of riding an easy, swirling current up to hovering safety, Linn flew higher than she had intended, and far faster. She spun end over end, her arms pulling at the sockets of her shoulders, vision lost to a blur of the darkened skies, glittering crystal palace and bright horizon.

  She flew eastward, and as she hung suspended and upside down for a long moment over the dark chas
m that separated the Sages, she saw them ignite their own clash.

  Elanil brought her palms together and the Eastern Dark matched her. Everything stopped for a brief spell. Linn saw each grain of salt and each spinning shard of ice as tiny stars held in the orbit of the Sages’ disagreement. She saw Misha’s fire and Myriel’s blue glow. She felt the sun’s warmth against her face and saw it out of the corner of her eye.

  She felt the blast—or rather, the wake of it—before she saw it. Frostfire met shadowfire in the emptiness above the gap. The collision broke the land, the percussions playing out like the world’s drums boiling up through the depths far below the frozen tundra. Fissures carved themselves, racing away in all directions faster than Linn flew. Above the chasm, the air flickered in the shape of a world, and then it took on color. It was like a sun, dark and bright all at once, with wisps of black and tongues of orange flame and a blue core. Frost grew along the outside and then shattered, and it burned too cold and too hot to make smoke.

  Below it, the shelves on which the Sages stood broke away, and Linn saw the ocean rush in far below, shooting up toward the Sages in an angry geyser.

  The world sped up again and Linn felt the resurgent panic in her chest as she spun away from the blast, the patched sky above and the frozen waves below looking like the same deadly carpet to her. She began to fall, far too quickly to stop herself, and as she saw a mirrored sheet of glass rushing up to meet her, she brought her arms forward like wings, yelling at the wind to obey.

  It did its best, the scythes of air shattering the deceptively thin sheet below her and slowing her just a hair. Linn twisted before she hit the ground in the chamber below, and when she did, she was sure that she had not gathered enough wind to break her fall, so hard was the impact.

  She coughed and covered her eyes as the rest of the ceiling broke away and rained down atop her. Oddly, she felt a wash of heat and heard shattering as the shards struck the ground around her.

  All was still and silent but for the now-distant raging of the Sages’ clash, the shaking of the frozen lands that were beginning to crack, and the faint crackling that echoed in the cave she had fallen into. Crackling like a fire, and warm like one, even gentle.