“Until now he was, yes,” Sylvie said, and she held up her hand. She closed her fist, and there was a flash of light above her hand which did not subside but instead radiated there like a disk of light floating above her fist. She pulled her hand down, and from the light came another shin-buto. Yet where Jovian’s was sheathed in ivory, with a pommel of the same and a golden tassel, this new one was made of lapis lazuli, trimmed in silver, and with a silver tassel at the base of the pommel.
“This was your Aunt Pharoh’s,” Sylvie said. Standing, she took it over to her daughter and sat it across Angelica’s knees. She then handed Jovian his back. The weight of it was surprisingly light, and where it touched her skin she felt a humming presence. “She wants you to have it, as she can no longer use it, and it is part of your calling.
“In times past it was only great warriors who fought for the light who carried these relics. Now these are few left, for when the warrior who wields it dies, the shin-buto retreats back to the ether from which it was pulled.”
“But you are dead and your shin-buto is still here,” Jovian said, indicating the sword at his side.
“Yet I’m still here. In time you will understand,” Sylvie said cryptically. “Now, I think it’s time that you sleep. I’m sure you haven’t been able to get much of that of late.”
They spent the night in their aunt’s old room, Jovian on the large divan that stood before the fire, and Angelica in the giant downy bed. They thought as they drifted off to sleep, completely relaxed in a way that only intense pain could conjure in its wake, that they had never felt more at ease than they did there in the Shadows Grove.
And for the first time in weeks the sounds of animals sang them to a restful sleep filled with dreams of home.
In the morning when they woke, Joya, Uthia, Tegaris, and Gob had once again joined them, but there was a curious difference. There was no evidence of the Shadows Grove around them. They woke on the ground, by a large campfire, curled up in their cloaks. The sense of home was no longer there; they no longer felt at peace or one with the forest around them. The trees were different, not the towering monoliths they had been, and there was no sight of mountains, and no divine grace such as they had felt when in the Shadows Grove.
They came to the realization that the Shadows Grove might not have been anything other than a dream, but one thing was certain. In the course of a few hours they had traversed miles, maybe hundreds of miles.
And before them rose a terrifying black fogbank, waiting to consume the flesh of the rivals from the Holy Realm. Before them stood the accursed border of the Shadow Realm.
“See that milky haze over there?” Pi asked. It was midday on one of the numerous days crossing the jade bridge. “That is the boundary ward of the Holy Realm.”
“I didn’t realize there were boundary wards,” Cianna muttered.
“Oh surely you knew that, I thought everyone did!” Pi gesticulated. “Well, you don’t feel them so much as your wyrd does, and you can only sense the vibration if you are keenly tapped into your wyrd at the time of the crossing.” Cianna watched as it came more into view. It was like a towering wall of some milky white light which shifted and eddied in an unfelt breeze. Cianna thought that it almost seemed to be rippling like water, or a sheet in the wind. Cianna tilted her head and became dizzy looking up so high so quickly. She had to place a hand on the jade railing to keep her balance, but wasn’t surprised to see that the boundary reached all the way up to the sky. “I’m not sure really what it is for,” Pi finished thoughtfully.
“The boundaries came into being at the same time the Realm of Spirit left the lands,” Flora informed them. “It’s a way of knowing when one enters the realm that’s not supposed to belong there. Mostly it’s a tool of the Realm Guardians, so they can keep track of their borders.”
As they came closer and closer to the boundary, it faded from view. Cianna was pretty certain this was due to the shift of the sun and their close proximity to the boundary. She was aware that if Pi had not pointed it out to her, and it hadn’t been the right time of day, that she would never have seen it at all.
Around midday they crossed the boundary, or at least Pi told her they did. Cianna didn’t feel anything. The next few days or so would be within the Holy Realm, as Kelpie Way cut across the western slope of the Holy Realm.
Around their last break before finding their way station that night, the wind changed, and with it came a scent. Devenstar told them that they were being followed, and the people that followed were actually hunting them.
“That’s what I feared,” Flora said with concern. “This happened last time — wyrder hunters.” She stood with a sniff, gathered her robes about her, and motioned for them to follow her. “They will catch up with us before long, no doubt, but we must make as much haste as we can. If it wasn’t for the strange occurrences with the kelpies I would say we should not stop at the way station and head on. But for some reason they seem to be pulled to us, so we must seek the shelter of four walls and a roof. Come.”
They reached the way station as the sun was setting bloody red in the western sky. Cianna wanted to ask Flora if the hunters would be daunted by the kelpies the same way they were, but she knew the old lady would not have an answer for her.
Dinner was held in silence, all of them thinking of what they could do against the new threat of the wyrder hunters. Cianna wasn’t sure there was much they could do but stand and fight without the use of their gifts. She wasn’t sure what type of combat training any of her companions had, but hers was good. Still, Cianna wasn’t sure that she would pit her skill against the unknown number of hunters behind them.
Wyrder hunters conjured another image of beings other than humans wanting to exterminate them. Cianna scoffed to herself; she knew that this was not the case, for she had read a lot on the corruption of the Well of Wyrding in history lessons. The wyrder hunters had begun as regular farmers that didn’t understand wyrd and feared it. Others caught on, thinking that the hunters had the right idea about eradicating the wyrders, and joined them in small groups.
Sleep came hard that night, for all of them had a great many things on their minds. There had been a little conversation as the night had drawn to a close. From what she could glean Cianna figured that all of them had some combat training, which was a good thing. Flora encouraged them not to harm the people who hunted them, for they did so out of fear. Cianna was of the mind that she was going to give them something to fear if they wanted it. She had come to realize with the chaos dwarves that when necessity called for it she was a killer. If they feared wyrd, then Cianna would try her hardest to play on that fear.
The cramps came to her again, the strange pulling within her being, as if she were calling something to her. She couldn’t understand it, and as the kelpies started their nightly whining and leaping through the wards of the bridge, arching around their way station in shimmering arches of light, Cianna rolled onto her side and fell fast asleep.
The woman came to her out of the darkness of her dreams. She glided forward, as if on a wind, the white sequins of her dress shining silver and gold and honeyed pink in a light that didn’t exist in the blackness which separated dreams and wakefulness. It was in that time, as Cianna was slipping into her nightly voyages in the realm of dreams, that the woman approached, catching her before she was too far gone to sleep.
The sequined dress she wore was strapless, and clung to her skin in a long sweep. It was slit up the side nearly to her hip, and through that cut Cianna saw a glimpse of shapely alabaster skin.
In truth the woman was so white that she did appear to be carved out of some preternatural stone that radiated its own light. Her fingers were tipped with golden nails that looked less like they were painted and more like they were golden talons which had been joined with the white stone of her flesh. She carried in her hand a cane of the same gold as her fingernails, and wore upon her silken blonde head a golden top-hat. The top-hat was pulled down in such a way as to block the view to t
he woman’s eyes, and showed nothing more than the bottom half of her face: a crooked nose and shapely pink mouth.
The woman stopped before Cianna and held out her hand.
The moment that she took the woman’s hand—which was surprisingly warm despite the cold look of it—Cianna knew that this woman was here because of her wyrd.
Cianna wasn’t sure, but by the weakness in her knees and the thundering in her head as she took the smiling woman’s hand she would have nearly thought she was a Goddess.
If not a Goddess, then something close, that is higher than an angel. If that was at all possible.
She shook Cianna’s hand and smiled deeper. This woman had everything to do with Cianna’s gift, yet at the same time Cianna knew that this woman cherished life, that she celebrated it where most of the necromancers to have preceded Cianna seemed to be those bent on death.
Without words, the white-clad woman beckoned her forth with a gentle gesture. She held her cane aloft, as if it were not so much a walking aide but instead a scepter of incredible power and prestige.
Cianna followed the woman that was not quite a Goddess through the darkness, and though she knew she was taking steps it felt as if she were staying put, and not moving at all. Finally the woman stopped.
She pushed forth her white hand tipped with golden fingernails and seemed to separate the darkness as if it were a curtain.
Cianna gazed out of the darkness to the ruins of a city and heard faint crying. She made a slight motion as if she were going to step through the curtain, and in that single thought she was on the other side of the woman, standing within the smoldering, shredded skeleton of a city which she didn’t recognize, but knew from the strange suddenness of the town, the haphazard way it seemed to have just been established with colorful tents among sand dunes, that she was within an encampment within the Realm of Fire.
Though the fires crackled with life among the pinions and flags of the tents, that was about the only life Cianna could feel about her. There was a coldness to the air that had her rubbing her arms and shuddering in the night, despite the fires consuming homes and dead bodies. Cianna knew that the coldness she was feeling was the coldness of death.
A sudden pop of fire and crackle of wood as a tent collapsed made Cianna jump. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before moving on.
Again she heard a faint crying, and ambled her way through makeshift streets, the sand hardened by many trampling feet before her voyage, to where she could hear the weeping clearest. The noise she heard, so full of despair and longing for life came from a short little girl who at once reminded Cianna so much of herself when she was a youth.
The little girl was dressed in a simple burlap robe.
The little girl turned her caramel-colored face to Cianna, and she could see the tear tracks down her chubby cheeks. She could not be any older than eleven, though she was rather short and chubby for her age. Cianna looked at her coffee-colored hair with its highlights of caramel and thought that they could almost be related, their features were so similar.
The little girl held out her pudgy, dirt-smeared hand to Cianna, and for the first time in what Cianna could tell was a long time she smiled, and Cianna’s wyrd reflected in the child. Impossibly, this little girl was a necromancer.
“How?” Cianna asked, but the little girl only smiled. It was a sad curving of the lips that seemed to be the first joy she had had in weeks. Cianna found herself wondering how long this little girl had been here among all the dead. She also wondered what had happened to kill everyone here so assuredly.
Before she could get an answer, however, she was pulled back from her dream into the darkness of the way station. She sat up with a gasp and saw Flora staring at her from the corner.
“What are you?” The old lady asked. “What kind of being are you to radiate wings of light?”
“Excuse me?” Cianna said quietly into the night. She realized as she sat up that the kelpies were no longer present and that her cramps had gone.
“Do you not know that you grew wings just now? They were not actual wings, but instead made out of wyrd. I was barely able to see them, but out of the corner of my eye they shimmered just on the edge of your back. What are you?”
“I’m a necromancer,” Cianna said.
“I know that, but what is your race? You are not human.”
“Because you saw something out of the corner of your eye?” Cianna pushed herself up on the waterbed set into the jade frame. “Sounds to me like you saw the kelpies by the window,” Cianna gestured to the window directly beside her bed.
“I know what I saw. I used to run with grigori, I know what it looks like when they use wyrd,” Flora leaned forward. “What I want to know is why you were using wyrd and what you were doing.”
Cianna sighed. There was no point in lying to this woman. “I will answer your questions if you answer mine.”
“You know I don’t have to, right?” Flora answered.
“And neither do I,” Cianna said, some of the flare coming back to her, some of the anger that she could so easily slip into these days. It was just such anger that saw her slaughtering countless chaos dwarves.
“But you will,” Flora said.
“I’m the child of Pharoh LaFaye and Arael,” Cianna said shortly. “Now you, what were you doing running with grigori?” Cianna thought this the more important question, for when someone said they ran with grigori it didn’t cast them in a positive light.
Flora seemed stunned into silence by Cianna’s proclamation, and made as if to disregard the woman’s answer. She looked deeper into Cianna’s face and a light of recognition seemed to come to Flora then.
“I fell in love with a grigori, one of the old ones, not like the Aralist version of the race. I got used to telling when he was using wyrd.” Flora sat back and watched Cianna. “Why were you using wyrd?”
“I wasn’t, or at least I didn’t realize I was.”
“What was happening to you while you slept?”
“I was dreaming of an extremely white woman adorned in gold and white. She took me through a veil of darkness and into a ruined town; beyond that I can’t tell.” Cianna could remember her dream vividly, she just didn’t feel like sharing it all with the woman. The meeting with the little girl was too intimate, too personal. For some reason, though the contact with the white woman was intimate, Cianna felt as though she needed to share it with Flora.
“That would be Mama Brigit,” Flora nodded knowingly. “She is what they call a loa in the Realm of Fire, where she is said to originate from. Others might call her an aeon, the race of angels that are higher than angels, but not as powerful as the Goddess. She is said to be the mother of necromancy. It is speculated that she was the first necromancer, but history doesn’t reach back that far, only speculation.”
“Where did you learn that?” Cianna asked. “I have pored over hundreds of scrolls and tomes, and various other writings on necromancy, and never heard that one.”
“Have you ever read Necromancy: Through the Dark Veil by the Liche Andreis Lupemore?” Flora asked.
“No, I passed that one up, it didn’t seem that impressive.” Cianna looked down into her lap, suddenly feeling rather foolish.
“I’m sure that if you had read it you would have learned countless valuable pieces of information about your gift. Though it’s no wonder you passed it up; it was such a small book it was a wonder it held as much enlightenment as it did.” Flora sighed and took a drink of something that Cianna hadn’t previously seen. Cianna, in turn, got up, wrapped a blanket around herself and joined Flora in another chair by the fire. “There’s an unspoken rule about wyrd. Your mind, Cianna LaFaye, will lead you right. If you passed up that book for another one, then there was obviously something else you needed to learn more than about Mama Brigit. It is that way with all wyrd. There is a reason for everything a wyrder chooses and doesn’t choose to do, Whether or not we know it at the time, we are letting our minds, our wyrd itse
lf, choose our paths.”
It was the first time Cianna had ever been called by her full name. Cianna sat in awe for a time before she recovered enough for what Flora said to sink in. Hearing her full name being spoken seemed to hold such power. Just the mere mention of the name LaFaye to her caused a thundering of blood to ripple through her ears, so much so that Flora words were nearly drowned out by it.
“I think it would be wise, in light of the situation, that we accompany you to the Necromancers’ Mosque, don’t you?” Flora smiled and all Cianna could do was nod her head. “Good. Wake the others, I’m sure that if the wyrder hunters are serious about what they are doing they will not wait long after the kelpies stop their haunting to continue after us.” Flora stood along with Cianna, and started packing as Cianna roused a weary Pi.
Cianna went about the way station waking her companions, thinking the entire time about how odd and how fitting Flora’s choice of words were. Haunting, Cianna mused, feeling a strange vibration within her at the thought.
It was a few hours before first light when they started their journey again. They could still hear the plaintive braying of the kelpies far below, but Cianna knew somehow that they would not be making any more passes over the bridge this night. There was no longer that pulling sensation in her, which she had come to associate with the kelpies coming.
From time to time Devenstar would fall back to the end of the line and raise his face to the breeze, which was working in their favor today and blowing the scent of those behind the group forward. He turned back each time with an increasingly less favorable look on his face. They instinctively understood that this meant the hunters were gaining on them.
“Deven?” Cianna asked. “Does the scenting, the using your animal side, take wyrd to use?”
Deven seemed to think for a moment and then shook his head. “No, I don’t believe so, and if it does it isn’t a large amount. There are some people who can change as part of their race, then there are others who are imbued with a more animal wyrd, and therefore can mimic the wyrd within them to change, that is the type I am. When I change it isn’t so much that I’m channeling wyrd to do so, but instead like my physical form is mirroring the wyrd flowing within me.”
The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) Page 22
