“So you are saying your wyrd is more that of a cat than a human?” Cianna wondered.
“A panther, to be exact, and yes. It’s very rare. So rare in fact that you will be more likely to find a shape-shifter by race than by wyrd.”
“Shape-shifters are very rare indeed,” Cianna commented.
“Then you can imagine how rare I am,” Deven gave her a smile that was all show and she laughed at him.
“Yeah, you’re something all right,” she agreed.
“I have an idea of what he is,” Pi said, joining the conversation. “But I will go with politeness and say that he is indeed something.”
Cianna laughed again and they continued walking, keeping their brisk pace.
No matter how fast they walked, however, the wyrder hunters still caught up with them.
It was around midafternoon when an arrow shot out of the gathering fog behind them and penetrated painfully into Pi’s leg.
It was obvious that there was no getting away from the wyrder hunters as droves of them loomed out of the fog after Cianna’s small group. Instantly the rapier came to her hand, and in a fluid motion she brought her crossbow around to rest on her arm. The loading chamber that was fixed on her crossbow allowed her to fight with both bow and blade, and she danced through them like death itself, plunging here, unleashing a bolt there.
Around her the air sizzled with wyrd as lightning and fire and pure energy raged with a fury that Cianna had never seen alive before, even living with the Realm Guardians for as long as she had.
Devenstar was right beside her, moving with a grace that was as catlike as he claimed his wyrd to be. He lunged, slicing with a blade, spraying the muted jade bridge with a long slice of crimson blood, lending the bridge an even more ethereal look than the stone ever could.
They fought like a team as the other three behind them worked their wyrd. At the time, the wyrder hunters were a bigger threat than the corruption from the Well of Wyrding.
Cianna ducked blows and parried attacks while beside her Deven lunged and slunk, taking down men gracefully wherever he went.
Soon the bridge was bathed in blood and dead bodies, and yet the hunters still came. Cianna wagered that it was less like a mob and more like a small army. She was tiring fast, and from the slight fizzling of the wyrd coursing around her she knew that all but Flora were tiring as well. She wondered whether Chy was even able to join the melee, and she hoped that if he wasn’t that they had sent him running ahead, for he deserved life if they happened to fail.
Soon Cianna was joined by Clara, Devenstar’s twin. Clara had obviously worked her wyrd to near exhaustion and was now beside Cianna fighting sword to sword with a hunter. She was doing well, but before long she was lost from sight as their paths of battle took them further and further apart.
A large man loomed up before Cianna, but from behind her a bolt of red lightning burnt the air, and he fell, a large blackened hole in his chest, his mouth working for air that he could not seem to grasp.
The mob thinned enough for Cianna to glimpse Devenstar to her right, and Clara to her left. Cianna ran through one man and put a bolt through the eye of another as he charged up from behind his falling comrade. Pulling the rapier from her victim, she glanced left just as Clara faltered, stumbled, and took a stout blow in the chest with the heavy, spiked mace of the man she was struggling with.
She looked at the mace in her chest, gasped a few times, and stumbled backward as the mace was tugged free of her, tearing her flesh and nearly ripping her breast from her body.
Clara stumbled back against the railing and Cianna did her best to get to her, slicing through the men as she hadn’t before, filled with a hunger, and an anger that would not let her rest. Before Cianna knew it there was wyrd flying around her, clearing a path for her. Someone, she assumed, was helping her to get to Clara, and she figured by the startled sobs and angry shouts that this maniacal green wyrd was coming from Pi.
As Clara flipped over the edge of the jade bridge, Cianna ran for her. She bent over the railing, half expecting to lose her balance as she reached for the flaxen-haired woman. She didn’t know what she expected to do, for even if she were able to catch her the young woman’s chest had been caved in by the mace strike.
“No!” Cianna yelled, reaching further for the woman, and felt that telltale pulling within her stomach. Halfway to the ground Clara’s body stopped in midair, and slowly began to float back up toward Cianna. Cianna was confused beyond thought, for she had never been able to make a person float before. In fact, she had never known any necromancer that could cause physical flight without the aid of ointments and potions.
Then she saw the slight gossamer shifting in the air beneath the still form of Clara. Could Clara truly be dead? She was a sorceress after all, wasn’t she supposed to be immortal? Had she actually gone through her trials yet to make her immortal? Cianna’s eyes widened with awe as she heard someone come up behind her. She turned and ran the man clean through with her rapier. She smoothly slipped him over the side of the bridge as well and watched as he was caught in the same insubstantial netting that Clara was hoisted on.
Before the next man attacked her Cianna watched as gossamer threads of what looked like spider silk caught in the sun spun out of the mouth and nose of the man, but not Clara. She looked with her wyrd, this she knew. For the longest time Cianna had seen double, with her wyrd and with her eyes, as was the case with all necromancers. She knew what she was seeing was the soul leaving the recently dead body.
In awe she watched the soul attach itself to the shifting, insubstantial cloud beneath them raising them up. Cianna realized what she was looking at were the kelpies, for the pulling in her stomach told her as much. What startled her more than anything, however, was the fact that the kelpies were the souls of dead humans.
This she could use. Reaching out with her wyrd, she grabbed tightly ahold of the kelpies coming toward her. In shock at being commanded in such a way, the kelpies dropped the bodies of Clara and the man she had recently killed. They fell slowly through the thick air, and once they were clear of the kelpies they fell with an impossible haste to splash into the swamp which made up the border.
Cianna turned and fired with her crossbow as she heaved the kelpies up and over the large jade bridge. They wreathed around her, consuming her in their shimmering fog and blocking her from view of those on the bridge.
Mistress, command us! They pleaded in such a volume that all on the bridge could hear their deadly whispers.
Kill! Cianna raged. Kill all who oppose me! She felt a twist within her which was partially the kelpies, partially something else she couldn’t describe, though it felt like corruption.
The kelpies instantly swarmed over the mass of hunters as another wyrding from Pi and Flora rocked the bridge on its very foundations, tossing hunters here and there. The air vibrated with raw power.
Within moments the men who assailed them were nothing more than blood stains on the bridge as the kelpies carried their fallen bodies over the edge, chasing them down into the oblivion of their watery tombs.
It took them some time to gather their thoughts after the fight. For long moments they all stood where the battle had placed them, breathing heavily into the cool, moist air. Thoughts chased themselves through everyone’s minds, and there was more than a few tears shed over the loss of Clara.
“It’s okay,” Deven said somberly. “She might have gone through her trials already. She might still live.”
“You know she hadn’t,” Pi sobbed.
In time Cianna turned, shaking herself out of her contemplation. With that movement the thoughts chased themselves away and reality came swimming onto her with such clarity that it hurt her eyes and mind to conceive her surroundings.
“What now?” She asked with a croaked voice. “Where’s Chy?”
“I sent him away when the battle started,” Flora said, and nodded to a weeping Pi. The young woman stood straighter from where she clung to the
bridge where Clara had met her demise. She cupped her hands to her mouth and there she whispered something that only her palms could hear. There was a slight green glowing of her wyrd, not a noxious green as one would expect from the corruption of the well, but instead a soft, spring green, almost like sage. She held her hands up and there Cianna saw a small, shifting, glowing green ball. Languidly it drifted from her hands and bobbed down the bridge in the direction they were traveling.
“Where do we go from here?” Pi asked. “What are we going to do, Flora?”
“Hold your heads up!” Cianna said sharply. “Clara would not want this, she would not want you to fall apart. We travel now to the Necromancers’ Mosque, and from there to the Realm of Earth.”
Deven and Pi looked at Flora, who nodded her consent. They all looked to Cianna then and nodded, for they saw within her something they hadn’t seen so well in Flora: a leader.
The black lightning-like energy licked out of Porillon’s fingers, and tendrils caressed the ground and trees where moments before the LaFaye youths had fled. Where the energy touched, the forest and ground blackened and shriveled. The Norns knew that at any moment she would turn that energy on them. They knew the spell was designed to feed the wyrder from the life-force of the object touched. A wyrding like that to an unprotected person would kill them in a matter of moments.
Together they worked, the three sorceresses in tandem to the one dalua sorceress. The Norns wove their wyrd together into a ward of sorts, so when the maniacal wyrd from Porillon touched them it would not kill them, but instead tap into the wyrd of the surrounding area to feed her in their stead.
Before long she did exactly what they knew she would. With a snarl of dismay that the LaFayes had effectively escaped her once more, she wrenched the black tendrils in their direction. As if they were the blood on which the leach of wyrd fed, the tendrils attached themselves to the ward and began to pump the wyrd back into Porillon, who fed greedily. This caused one other problem, however — it meant that when the warding finally failed Porillon would be even more powerful than she had been previously.
The Norns had to work fast so that she would not be alive to see to their destruction. Anger at the escape of the ones they came for fueled their wyrd, and they conjured power to them. They had intended it to be the power of the Goddess, for she was the one they served, but since they had absorbed the power of Chaos through the well so beautifully they now had a new master. The power they called to bear upon Porillon was meant to be a conjuring of power and light. It was a conjuring of power alright, though it wasn’t light.
They threw back their heads, and most unlike the violent wyrd that was being wielded that day, the power that oozed from them was not violent in its leaving and directing. The power, black mixed with putrid yellow, oozed from their open mouths and noses like pipe smoke. It rippled and eddied down to the ground where the hands of the three possessed forms directed it toward their assailant. Still more and more of the wyrd-smoke was released from their bodies and flowed toward the laughing dalua sorceress that attacked them with the full might of Chaos.
Around them the ground and trees began to blacken as the ward they had put in place against Porillon sapped the very life itself out of the once-happy village of Greenwood. It was moment by moment becoming a black, charred wasteland devoid of life, as even what birds were left began to drop out of the branches dead.
The smoke wyrd of the three women found its mark and began coiling around Porillon like yellow and black snakes. She began to struggle and the life-sapping black wyrd tentacles she wove at them began to fizzle as the Norns’ wyrd overcame her, enclosing her in a ball of wyrd.
She started screaming, and the Norns were finally able to let down their ward. The ball was consuming her this very moment, they knew. However, something else was happening within the orb that they couldn’t see, for Porillon was able to control Chaos better than they were. In fact she was even able to channel the rudimentary wyrding they had placed on her to her advantage. She fixed a destination in her mind, and channeled the full presence of the wyrd through her body. In a shattering ripple of wyrd the black orb exploded outward.
Trees and plants were utterly decimated, and some of the more youthful vegetation was instantly turned to dust from the sheer impact of the wyrd upon the air. The very air itself split in a boom that they had never heard before, but to their ears sounded like a huge explosion of naphtha and fire.
The Norns had to cover their faces against the branches and other debris that littered the air. The noise burst their eardrums, brought blood to their noses, and damaged their very bodies as the pressure of the sound assailed them. The presence of the noise tossed them through the air as if they were nothing more than rag-dolls in a tornado. They bounced off trees and their bodies shattered off boulders so hard as to tear the large formations from their previous perch in the ground.
Broken and bleeding, Dalah, Rosalee, and Grace lay on the ground, blood and thicker fluids running from every orifice of their bodies, and some new ones that the melee had created. Slowly their bodies began to reform and restructure in a cacophony of snapping bones and sucking liquid sounds as internal organs, tendons, and muscle tissue reformed itself.
When the three of them rose, readjusting parts of their anatomy with squelching noises, they saw no trace of Porillon, only the black crater that was left of Greenwood in her passing.
They walked the whole length of the ruinous town looking for any evidence of Porillon or the ones they trailed. The LaFaye youths had escaped into the forest before, but surely they hadn’t gotten that far before the destructive force of Porillon struck out.
Grace turned to see the other two women looking out where the youths had fled. There she saw a shimmering black shadow retracing its path further and further into the forest. Before it had been blotted from view, but now they could see further into the woods.
“They went in there.” Dalah stated it assuredly, and there was no need for her to say where they had gone precisely. The being that wore the face of Grace seethed and toiled within its borrowed shell. She could feel the power of the shadows as they slipped away with a liquidity that belied what was held beyond their veil. None would know that within the small cloud of shadows rested a place of such holy wyrd.
“Yes they did,” Grace said. She watched the dark blot fade from her sight. She turned and looked to the redhead standing behind her.
“The Shadows Grove has helped them as we should have known it would,” Rosalee said.
“Yes,” Grace replied.
“What now?” Dalah asked.
The being that was within Grace strode back to the center of the once-thriving township of Greenwood and looked up at the skittering clouds high above. She clasped her hands behind her and rocked back on her heels, thinking. The sorceress Norn which held the plump old lady scanned the memories of Grace and smirked a little as she remembered telling the LaFayes that if anything happened they were to meet her in the Realm of Earth, at the Guardians’ Keep.
“I think it is high time we pay the Realm Guardians a visit,” Grace said with a smile that the other two mirrored.
What Now?
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FLIP THE PAGE FOR A GLIMPSE OF BOOK 4: A GUARDIAN OF SHADOWS
Joya hummed with power, with wyrd. She gazed into the sinister fogbank of the Shadow Realm and desired nothing more than to step into it, be enveloped in its darkness, and become one with its borders. The shadows called to her, and her heart answered in turn. She shivered.
How could she be so drawn to this accursed
land, after all she had learned about it in her childhood? This was the land of dalua, of chaos hounds, of alarists. This was the land of the cursed, of the damned, of the negative side of spirit. The people within the Shadow Realm hated those from the Holy Realm. She was from the Holy Realm. Why did Joya ever think it was a good idea to come this way?
She closed her eyes and braced herself against the lure of the shadows. She had to be strong; this was a test. This was the Shadow Realm. But if she thought about it too long, Joya could feel the shadows licking out of the border between the Realm of Earth and the Realm of Shadow to caress her skin: calling her, welcoming her home.
“What do you think we’ll find inside?” Jovian asked, more than a slight quiver of fear and anticipation in his voice. It broke Joya’s communion with the swirling abyss before her.
“Come on, Jove, you know what we’ll find there,” Angelica said breathlessly. Her eyes gazed straight ahead, as if her sight could penetrate the darkness, see what lay beyond. But there was nothing to see beyond — only more darkness.
And occasionally a shape, Joya thought. At times she could see something skirting under the surface of the shadows, swirling against the boundaries of the darkness, rippling it like water. She shivered again.
Most of her life people had assumed she was from the Shadow Realm, due to her dark hair and features. Joya’d had to persuade them she wasn’t by showing the white stigmata on her palms, marking her as one from the Holy Realm. But she reserved her judgment about what this realm was actually like. She’d heard stories, and none of them good. How could they survive, she wondered? In the Shadow Realm there was never any trace of light. The fogbank that stretched up to the heavens also blackened out the sun, it was said. She figured there would only be one way to find out.
The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) Page 23
