She watched as Grace faded from sight, and right after her sister was gone Sara lost consciousness, the wad of paper still grasped in her lifeless hand.
The town of Greenwood was most likely named after the trees themselves. All of the trees were covered with a soft, velvety moss that was so vibrant and so green as to remind Angelica of emerald. Each and every tree seemed chiseled and carved out of emeralds, and were some of the grandest trees she had ever seen.
The town itself reminded her much of an elven dwelling, or at least reminded her of the elven dwellings depicted in storybooks. Angelica knew now what elven dwellings looked like, and while Whitewood Haven had been stunning visually, it held a simplistic beauty that this town could not have captured had it tried. Greenwood was obviously a reconstruction of what people imagined an elven dwelling to be.
As they walked down the central path toward the village, Angelica noted all the flowers in multitudes of colors, which grew larger than she could have imagined. Mushrooms and various other fungi grew at regular intervals, and seemed to be used by the citizens as seating. Truth be told, the fungi were arranged in odd groupings around gardens and ponds the way a normal city would have benches.
The magnitude of the village made Angelica feel rather small, and she wondered if the citizens of Greenwood were trying to be like elves or fairies with the largeness of all the plants. She didn’t feel really human walking through the village. It somehow made her feel abstract in a way she couldn’t really explain. She felt almost as if she had stepped into a play and was walking among the props.
Angelica smiled at the thought of seeing some human flutter by attached to a rope and pulley system so that they felt more fey.
“Where are all the houses?” Joya asked, looking around. Angelica hadn’t really thought about it before, but now that Joya mentioned it she didn’t see any houses to speak of.
“The houses are built into the trees,” Uthia said.
“Doesn’t that harm the trees?” Jovian asked.
“Long ago, when Greenwood was first formed, the wyrders then had strange powers that we can only now marvel at. Some of those powers were able to manipulate plants. When the trees for this village were planted they were done so with a small amount of wyrd, causing them to grow into not only trees and towering plants, but homes as well.” Uthia gestured to one tree they walked by.
“See there,” Uthia said, and they noticed an arching doorway that led into the darkness of the tree. “The tree actually grows rooms here and there within its trunk. Almost as one would find knots in a regular tree, in these you would find pockets of air that are conveniently formed into rooms without ever having to set chisel to wood.”
“That is a pretty neat trick,” Jovian said.
“Indeed,” Uthia sniffed. Jovian looked up at the towering tree, which reached high into the fleeting clouds. He could see where large fungi grew here and there on the tree outside openings that would normally be knotholes but instead were probably windows, with the platform-like funguses acting as balconies. He could barely fathom living in such a place, but imagined it would be an awful lot of fun to stay here.
“You don’t agree?” Joya asked as they picked up the pace.
“These trees are not exactly as a tree should be,” she informed them.
“How should a tree be?” Angelica asked.
“Free. Most people don’t think much about it, but a tree does have a lot of thoughts. Deep thoughts, loving thoughts, and sometimes painful thoughts. These trees don’t think of anything other than the humans they shelter.”
“Well they look healthy enough,” Jovian commented.
“They are taken care of well,” Uthia conceded. “It’s just that the wyrd they were formed with made them little more than servants. All the plants here were originally grown out of greedy desires, only planted and tended for because of the way they would look.”
“Where are all the people?” Jovian asked, stopping to look around. He could tell that the trees were homes, home which were well lived-in. He could also tell that the large fungi here and there were benches and that people often frequented such places as the ponds and the botanicals, but the one thing he didn’t see were people. It suddenly lent a melancholy feel to the town. This was a place that should be filled with laughter and joy, for it was too beautiful to contemplate anything else being here. It made him shiver with something akin to fear, and suddenly his nerves were on edge.
“When the Well of Wyrding was penetrated and leaked poison into the Sacred Forest,” Uthia began, “the people that live within the Sacred Forest sought refuge in other towns, towns that were far away from here.”
“How sad,” Angelica said. Suddenly the air sizzled around her and with a loud pop the Germinant Gob materialized in midair, plunking to the ground with a disturbed, and if such a thing were possible, more hostile look than normal.
“Trouble, Uthia,” he said, and that is when they heard the maniacal laughing of the black shuck. Jovian’s hair instantly stood on end and in an instant the Shin-Buto was out of its sheath and in his hands, the golden tassels at the end toying with his wrist.
“You could have told us sooner,” Uthia said, the Cataresh appearing in the same way it normally did. Her arm lengthened and grew to a point, and with a strange disjointing sound the sword fell out of what was her arm, to be gripped in twig-like fingers. Angelica couldn’t explain fully what it was like watching, but her sword was suddenly there, formed like any other sword, only it grew out of her arm to its proper length before forming its shape.
Angelica drew her mace and Joya got a distant look on her face as she began drawing her wyrd up her spine to the lemniscate.
“What is that?” Angelica asked.
“That’s what attacked me on the hunting trip,” Jovian told her.
“The—”
“Shh!” Uthia cautioned. “Do not speak its name; it’s bad enough we have to fight one.” Angelica blanched, but bit her tongue.
“Is there any way to get away from it?” Jovian asked. “I mean, fighting the deadly beast is all well and good, but I’m not feeling overly heroic today. Do you think we could, I don’t know, get around the dalua?”
“Why didn’t you tell us of this before?” Uthia scolded the Germinant Gob.
“Because that,” he jabbed a stubby, leaf-clad finger in the direction of the laughing, “is not the danger I came to warn you of.”
There was a rustling of bushes and Uthia turned around in time to see a tall, gray-haired woman stepping out of the bushes, a deadly, contorted look on her face. The woman was clearly insane. “That is what I came to warn you of.”
“We have trouble back here as well,” Uthia said, spinning her sword in her hand.
Joya turned to see the old lady stepping out of the woods and coming toward them. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Uthia asked the gnome king again.
“I had only just happened on her myself. Besides, it wouldn’t have done you any good to have fled,” Gob said.
“Dear Goddess,” Joya said as her wyrd curled inside her in response to the other woman. “Her wyrd is so … Chaotic.”
“She’s a caustic,” Gob informed them, and Uthia’s black eyes hardened.
Just then the source of the laughter stepped out of the woods in front of Angelica and Jovian. For the first time Angelica was witness to the sulfurous green eyes and the wicked gorilla face with its tusks.
“Grace said they couldn’t exist,” Angelica reminded Jovian, as if she were arguing with the reality that the shuck was indeed here before them.
“Only if he has come back,” Jovian reminded her, backing away from both threats as everyone else was, forming into a tighter knit group. “Grace could have been wrong, I suppose.” His voice shook with fear, for he had faced the black shuck before, and he had not won that battle, barely had he escaped with his life.
“How often does that happen?” Angelica asked.
“Next to never,” he said.
“Do you have your shields up, sorceress?” Uthia said to Joya. The group drew to a halt, half facing the black shuck, and half facing the caustic. They were trapped in the center.
“I’m immortal,” Joya said, confused. “There’s little she can do to harm me.”
“Well the rest of us aren’t immortal, so shield us, damn it.”
“Oh, right,” Joya said, and closed her eyes. It took her a laborious moment to get the wyrd right, but before long she was spinning a web of wyrd around them. Angelica and Jovian felt the power sweep over them like a cold draft of wind that prickled their flesh and stole their breath away for a moment. When the shield was in place it sparked, sending a glow around them. After a moment the glow faded, but out of the corner of their eyes they were still aware of the shield as a milky radiance along their peripheral vision.
It didn’t go up a moment too soon, for as soon as the caustic had seen the flash she sent a storm of wyrd at them. Lightning flashed and rebounded off their shield. Joya tensed visibly and creased her eyebrow.
“Hold it,” Uthia told her sternly, and Joya held it up. In the haste with which she had built it the shield was not as complete as it could have been. A little bit of the lightning didn’t ricochet off into the forest, splitting trees as it went, but instead leaked through. Because of the curve of the shield it slanted up and out the top of the protective wyrding.
“Do you think that you can do any attacking while holding the shield?” the Germinant Gob asked.
“I don’t think so,” Joya admitted, now holding her hands up, visibly shaken by the constant lightning attack.
“Then pass the wyrding to me,” Gob said. “I can hold your wyrding, but can’t attack like you can. You might want to get in touch with that medallion there.”
From the look on her face Joya hadn’t thought about that. “How do I pass it to you?” she asked.
“Let it fall when I tell you, not a moment before. I will take control of it just as you let it crumble.”
There was a moment of silence within the shield as the torrent of wyrd happened outside. Angelica and Jovian watched the shuck pacing back and forth, no longer coming for them due to the wyrd. Angelica imagined that a creature as Chaotic as the shuck couldn’t enter the protective boundaries.
“Now!” they heard the Germinant Gob say, and there was a slight translucency that came to the milky light at the edge of their vision before it glowed back to life once more.
The light slowly changed from a milky pink to a greenish brown that matched the Germinant Gob’s wyrd.
“That’s all well and good, but we are trapped here,” Jovian commented when the black shuck sat down and glared at them, its coarse hair ruffling as it puffed out its agitation. The caustic seemed to realize that her attack was not working, and instead began pacing much like the black shuck.
“I can hold this shield for a while,” the Gob said.
“Yes, but we have places to be. If you remember, we have a psychotic sorceress after us, unless you are truly working for your gnomes and wish to use us as bait for her.”
“Joya might be able to vanquish your problem,” Uthia said. “But the only way that caustic is dying is by removing her head.”
“Is there any way that you can split this shield between the five of us?” Angelica asked.
“I don’t know if I would be able to support five separate shields at once,” the Germinant Gob confessed. “We can try it, but be prepared if they fail.”
“Please try,” Joya said.
The black shuck could obviously feel the disturbance in the wyrd, and it sat forward, coming to its hooves in a fluid motion that told Jovian and Angelica that it would be difficult to fight.
“I’m going to have to drop the one to set up the individual ones,” the gnome king told them.
“Be ready,” Jovian told Angelica as the shuck paced closer to them, waiting for what he could feel, and that was the shields to vanish.
She merely nodded, and when the shields dropped the black shuck was on them. Jovian dodged to the side just as the shuck came down where he had previously been standing. Angelica dove in, swinging her mace, but with a liquidity that the beast’s physical body belied, he shifted out of the way. Her mace thudded harmlessly into the ground, and Jovian barely pulled her out of the way as the shuck clawed at her. The pointed hooves barely scratched her, but she felt as though they had been a red hot iron burning her skin where he touched.
Behind them they heard the air concuss and a woman scream.
When the shields dropped the caustic also renewed her attack, though this time not with lightning. She struck out at them with mere force, compacting the air around Uthia as the dryad ran for her, intent on attack.
The caustic conjured fire in her hand, and pulled back her fist to make good the attack.
Joya knew without a doubt that the fireball the old woman was eager to throw would be the undoing of Uthia, and even as she tried to make contact with her aunt in the medallion, she struck out.
The air hardened around the caustic, and then battered at her, thrashing her here and there, slamming into her as if the air were alive with fists, and they wanted nothing more than to beat the life out of her. The fireball went out, and Uthia slackened as the air resumed its normal state around her.
The air sizzled as Joya threw a pink bolt of lightning at the caustic. It tore into the old woman, and she screamed. Joya was not content with that, and lifted the woman off the ground with the force of the bolt, throwing her through the air to slam heavily into a tree.
Uthia was running with her Cataresh at the ready even as the air slackened around her.
Meanwhile the black shuck seemed to dodge every attack Angelica and Jovian made. One time Jovian thought he had made an attack, but somehow it had missed the dalua as it glided around his blade like a current of air.
Does it even have bones? Angelica asked Jovian mentally, and Jovian sent back an uncertain response.
Behind them the air was alive with wyrd, and the black shuck seemed to feed off the Chaos within the caustic’s wyrd. He gained a lot of ground on them, and all Angelica and Jovian could do was retreat.
The creature came at them, tusks trying to gore them, hooves slashing at them. The fact that the beast was the size of a pony didn’t make fighting it easy, either, for it seemed all muscle and taut, Chaotic fury.
Finally Angelica dove in, ignoring the hooves, and swung her mace down. She had enough of retreating, and Jovian knew that once Angelica’s bloodlust had flared there would be no stopping her. She matched the beast fury for fury, her mace swinging, often missing, but at times landing a solid blow that seemed to do little to the creature.
Finally it reared its head and made to gore her, but as it brought its tusks up she slammed her mace down, and the tip of the tusk met the weight of her mace, driving the creature to the ground as the tusk shattered.
The black shuck stumbled in a daze, but by the time Jovian charged in with his shin-buto raised the beast had regained some sense, and bucked at Jovian, catching him in the midsection and throwing him back a few yards. Jovian was so afraid that he was going to break something upon impact with the ground that when he landed on a spongy mushroom he was surprised. The mushroom rebounded him and he entered the melee on staggering back on his feet.
Angelica was again giving ground to the snarling beast and its bloody maw. One side of its jaw was limp, apparently crushed when Angelica broke the tusk. Jovian dove in, stabbing with the sword, but the black shuck turned on him then, and a great spout of flame shout out of its mouth.
Jovian barely had time to bring the shin-buto up and fully expected the flames to overcome him, but the blade consumed the fire, taking it into itself. Jovian felt the pommel grow warm, and the strange, alien wyrd flowing through him from the sword, up his passive arm, and across his shoulders where it mingled with a bit of his latent wyrd. The fire blasted back down his dominant arm, and he quickly removed his hand from the swor
d and pointed it palm-out at the beast. His palm was on fire, and he screamed with the pain in his hand, for the flames were spewing out of the stigmata that marked him as one from the Holy Realm. It felt like acid burned the white dot as the fire blistered his palm and then bubbled out into a great jettison.
The red flames that shot out were relentless and all-consuming. They tore into the black shuck with a fury, and Jovian thought he was going to go numb with the pain, not sure how much longer he was able to persist with this attack. The black shuck howled as the red fire consumed his hair, crackling his flesh.
Angelica saw an opening, and brought the mace down on the center of the beast’s back, snapping it in two. The beast shuddered on the ground, pulling itself with its front hooves, its back legs dragging behind it, and though it was being burned, its flesh melting away, and it wasn’t able to use its legs, the creature still dragged itself ever onward toward Jovian.
It met its end on the point of Jovian’s sword as he stabbed it down through the head.
With all the action the group was in, the Germinant Gob was not having any luck bringing up the shields around his companions. When he nearly had it in place they would either move, destroying the fixed point he had, or some type of wyrd would penetrate the delicate membrane of the early part of the shield.
“I can’t do it!” he warned. “You aren’t shielded, so be careful.” He gave up and decided to help Uthia. He was short, so there wasn’t much he could do, but as he popped out of visibility, traveling the earth to the caustic, he figured he could at least distract her.
He popped up behind the old woman and kicked her in the back of the knee as she was releasing a fireball at Uthia. He wasn’t able to stop the fireball, but a gout of water sprang from Joya and deflected the fire, snuffing it at once.
The caustic turned on him, but Gob waved at her as she gathered her wyrd and snapped back out of visibility, dancing through the earth to the other side of her. Thus his attack went, skittering around her, not causing much harm at all but being a bother all the same, drawing her attention until finally Uthia bore down on her with a savage grace.
The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) Page 18
