Gifts of Vorallon: 03 - Lord of Vengeance

by Thomas Cardin

  Iris continued to look deeply into his eyes for a long while, carefully weighing his words against her memories, before shaking her head. “No, you are right. Now you need the sorcerer I became to escape those fears. Focusing my mind on arcane arts gave me a small form of relief.” Iris smiled at last. “Can we eat something first though? I am hungry as a bear.”

  Lorace allowed their link to drift out of its intensity and eased her out of his arms so they could sit upon the deck facing each other.

  Falraan pulled Tornin from his watchful post over Lorace to help her fetch their evening rations. When they returned, burdened with their dinner fare, they brought Oen with them. As they ate, the priest told them that Lehan was sleeping comfortably and that the other men they rescued were doing likewise.

  Iris lingered over her food until her full confidence had returned and Lorace saw her spirit brighten once more. At her nod, he aided her to her feet.

  “There will be no mistake this time,” Iris said.

  He hugged her tight, attuning their spirits together perfectly once more. You will never make the same mistake twice. “I know. Just tell me when you are ready, and I will look into the memory you hold foremost in your mind. Concentrate only on that memory; we will go slowly.”

  Lorace awakened his sight and performed the delicate shift to memory. She took several calming breaths against his chest.

  “Look now,” Iris said as she breathed out to a fully relaxed and focused state, her spirit almost motionless.

  With care, Lorace moved the focus of his shifted sight toward the heart of her white and golden spirit. Then the design appeared, an illustrated page within a large tome depicting a complex circular glyph. Its general detail was similar to the glyphs warding the stones of Halversome. Within the circle of the glyph were five other circles arranged almost like fingertips. Nested curves crossed through the design connecting the smaller circles to the outer circle. The scene began to flow. Iris, heavily cloaked in her memory, stretched out a slender finger to the illustration and traced along the lines of the glyph following an unbroken path along every edge and circle.

  “You must form the glyph in the same order in which I am tracing it,” Iris said, completely relaxed in his arms. “You must also get the design exactly right or it will not work when it is activated. Do you think you can achieve that accuracy?”

  “I can only try,” Lorace said as he committed all to his own memory before withdrawing his sight and hugging Iris again. “It will be a great practice of my ability.”

  “You can release the other tasks you are performing,” Iris told him. “I do not think anyone will mind if the ships are left to ride upon the water of their own accord once more.”

  Lorace looked at the progress they had made southwards along the coast of Ousenar since their recovery of the castaways. He looked as well to the spreading blight of undeath. It massed ahead of them now, spread out far into the Vestral Sea and building up like a high wall. We can go no further without these glyphs.

  “Oen, I need you to keep an eye on the blight for me while I am engaged with this,” Lorace bade the priest. “If it makes any advance toward us, you need to have your priests ready to create the light we used earlier.”

  “Very well, Lorace,” Oen said as he looked ahead. “It seems to be preparing for us somehow. I do not like the implications of that.”

  “Neither do I,” Lorace said then turned toward Moyan’s ship which he had drawn close beside them. “Moyan!” he called out. “I am going to stop us in the air for the time being. Have the men get what rest they can while I hold us still.”

  Moyan nodded and began calling out instructions to pass along to the other ships in the line.

  chapter 7

  FORGED AGAINST DARKNESS

  Twenty-Ninth day of the Moon of the Thief

  -upon the Vestral Sea

  The small flotilla of galleys hung motionless above the slow rolling swells of the Vestral Sea as the rim of the sun kissed the horizon.

  “All right,” Iris said with a smile. “Push yourself, but we do not have an endless supply of silver here to work with. I suppose it will help if we are not rocking upon the sea while you do this. Tornin, give us some light will you, Lorace can see in the dark, but we are all going to want to watch this. He works best under pressure.”

  Lorace acknowledged her wisdom with a nod while the light from Defender of the Youngest blossomed about them. He held the Guardian’s Chain perfectly still in the air before him. “Ready when you are Falraan, melt just a bit at a time; I will collect it and form the glyph.”

  A tiny red sphere of Falraan’s spirit, just large enough to encapsulate several of the silver links, appeared. Slowly the red sphere collapsed, the heat washed over his face as the silver began to sag. When the first molten drops fell, they collected in a crucible of shimmering air. Lorace replenished the air at a constant rate as the heat consumed it in tongues of yellow flame.

  “Just a bit more, please,” Lorace asked.

  They repeated the process on a few more links, and then he began work in earnest. Stepping through the order in which to construct the glyph, Lorace manipulated the crucible of air, squeezing the silver into shape before it could cool. He found focusing on the fine details of the glyph quite exhilarating as he used his sight to guide his delicate pushes and moldings of the air around the silver. It was a welcome application of his gift over the brute force lifting and pushing he had been doing for most of the day. As he worked, he developed finesse with his gift of air. I have been lifting the galleys all wrong.

  Iris let loose a yelp of joy when the first glyph, held in a perfect mold of air, was complete. She drew as close to it as she dared to examine his accuracy while it cooled. “Lorace, it is flawless, absolutely flawless. This will be quite potent once it has been enchanted.” She cast a broad smile at him. “Are you going to give up a future as the finest silversmith of Vorallon just to be a god? The world may never know its loss.”

  “Thank you, my love,” Lorace said with a flourishing bow. “If there is any silver left over, I will make both of you lovely women something special.”

  Iris smiled at him beatifically; all strain of her recent emotional ordeal having vanished from her face.

  “Are you ready for the next one, Falraan?” Lorace asked. Of course she is, look at that smile!

  “Yes, this is wonderful,” the redhead shared her excitement. “I am so pleased to use my gift for something so beautiful. This is how I wish to be known.”

  “Anything you create will be beautiful,” Iris said as she nodded with a wink toward Tornin who stood with his sword raised above their heads, blissfully unaware.

  Falraan reached out to give Iris’s hand a squeeze before she began melting the next portion of the Guardian’s Chain into Lorace’s crucible of air. He worked from flawless memory as he had with the first. Soon the four delicate glyphs were complete and cooling in the air, each one an identical work of perfection. His degree of control over his mastery of air had grown throughout the process. This intricate application had done far more toward strengthening his gift than the lifting of four colossal galleys from the waves.

  “Falraan, if you would care to melt the remainder…” He nodded toward the several links and a plate of the Guardian’s Chain that remained. She bent her will to the task with a delighted grin.

  What to make? He held the melted silver in his fiery crucible for a few moments while he thought hard on an appropriate gift for the two remarkable women. From the depths of his tranquility, the image came to him. He began shaping and molding a pair of fine silver chains. Perfect duplicates of Sakke Vrang in all but size took form as he shaped them link by link. He formed the chains into two closed loops, a necklace for each woman. Hanging trapped upon each necklace was a perfect silver ring—his emblem. Once they had cooled to the touch, he laid them over the heads of Iris and Falraan. This gained him another brief crushing hug from Falraan and a longer, tender hug and kiss from Iris
.

  “They are beautiful!” both women exclaimed, holding them up to each other.

  As they examined their gifts, he used the technique he had just learned molding the glyphs to adjust his hold on the galleys. Where he had been holding them aloft with many separate pads of air, he shaped one large pad for each ship, molding the air precisely to the underside of their hulls. For the additional air the task required, he reached out away from the region of the blight, lest he draw it toward them. The effort of maintaining just one shape, complex as it may be, was much less than holding hundreds of individual pads. He could feel the strain on the hull beneath his feet relax as the weight of the vessel was fully distributed upon the molded air.

  This changed one other factor in his manipulations of the ships, a quick test moving the molded air proved his theory.

  “Moyan!” Lorace called out to the commanding Zuxran once again. “Have your sailors bring down the sails, they are just going to slow us down from here on out. I can move the air I have molded to the hulls even faster than blowing wind into our sails.”

  He turned back to his wife as Moyan called out the order to furl the sails. “Iris, what is next for these glyphs?”

  “I need to enchant them so they, instead of the priests, will do the work of summoning the light for us,” Iris explained, taking her hands from the chain at her breast. “We will mount a glyph to each ship, and they will hold a strong, steady light. We must distribute a priest to each ship as well so that they may be on hand to activate them.”

  “Will they alone be strong enough?” Lorace asked. “I know that the glyphs of Halversome were quite tiring for the priests to maintain.”

  “That is because those glyphs do so much more,” Iris gave a cunning smile of intelligence. “They ward the stones, making them stronger against assault. All we ask of these glyphs is to produce the same blue-white light we projected earlier, a far simpler task. The more of Vorallon’s strength they hold within them, the brighter they shall be. There is another factor involved here and that is you, Lorace. If you and the priests provide the will to strengthen my spell as I enchant the glyphs, they will be incredibly potent.”

  Lorace nodded. “We will not stop there. I will forge a link to everyone here, and our combined will should provide us the weapons we truly need against this blight.”

  “And with the perfection of these glyphs’ craftsmanship, it will work,” Iris agreed as she gestured toward the now cooled glyphs of silver. “If they were flawed in any way, it would limit the amount of energy they could focus. Not to belittle the elven craftsmanship of Halversome’s warding runes, but they would work even better if they shared anything close to the perfection of these.”

  Lorace nodded to her again and focused once more on the galleys. He shifted them around with a gentle hand, careful not to knock anyone off their feet. When he had all their bows almost touching one another like four petals of a flower, he held them motionless once more. Lorace bade Tornin to unleash the light of his sword then stepped up into the air.

  “I call upon all of you for your aid,” Lorace let the wind carry his voice from bow to stern of all vessels as he lifted up the silver glyphs to float around him in a circle. “These are to be our first line of defense against the undeath that lies before us. They shall carry the spirit of Vorallon with us to our foes. I will link together all our wills toward the task of making them as potent as they can be. I ask your willing support for you are the true power behind our success.”

  Prince Wralka stepped forward to the bow of his galley while Adwa-Ki and Moyan did the same on their respective vessels.

  “Anything you wish,” Prince Wralka declared. “My warriors and I stand ready to give our utmost!”

  “You have the will of my people as well, Lorace,” Adwa-Ki bowed.

  “We have been your men from the beginning,” Moyan saluted with a fist to his chest.

  Lorace smiled in gratitude while he laid the glyphs into Iris’s waiting hands.

  “We will commence at once.” He spread a wave of his infinite sparks of spirit over the vivid rainbow of precious spirits before him, drawing them into a vast link. Their burgeoning eagerness to aid him was a palpable strength returned through their spirits. They will give everything of themselves. None should ask so much of these blessed people!

  As he had instructed Sir Rindal in the technique earlier today, he directed all their attention and will into Iris’s gold and white whorled spirit. The glyphs are perfect. He urged. Iris is the greatest sorcerer Vorallon shall ever know. Her spirit glowed bright. Her whorls of white gained definition and solidity. To all the certainty and will of the concert, Lorace added his love.

  Iris began her spell, uttering words from memory that she had learned from many dubious means in her previous life. You redeem yourself many times over now, my love. Sir Rindal’s masterful turquoise spirit of pure willpower led the flow of support. Lorace followed with all he could spare to reinforce and coax her spirit. Her words drew up the spirit of Vorallon, focusing it into the four silver glyphs. Rather than taxing the spirit of Vorallon, the very act seemed to be intensifying and strengthening his silver and indigo glow.

  The concert of will collected in his link, quickening and focusing the enchantment Iris cast, and the spirit of Vorallon awakened to it—reveled in it.

  The silver glyphs shone and glimmered with energy until they burst into a hot orange glow. Lorace’s eyes widened. I have seen that impossible glow before!

  The glow faded, reducing to a dull silvery shimmer. The silver of the glyphs had become godstone. Vorallon has blessed them with his greatest gift without the intervention of the Old Gods. These precious people, acting in concert, had produced the strength of spirit required to do something only the gods had ever done. Their combined wills had drawn forth godstone and forged it in a single tremendous effort.

  The spell completed, Iris swayed. Tornin appeared at her side in a flicker of movement, catching her before she could fall. No! Lorace released the linkage to everyone but Iris before they could likewise exhaust themselves. Then he leapt down to the deck to embrace her small, trembling form.

  “It was incredible, Lorace,” Iris murmured. “Vorallon’s spirit will flow wherever these glyphs should go.” She looked up at him with a slight smile before she collapsing in his arms. Stay with me! All the warnings she had given the priests against drawing too much power flooded back to him. Lorace turned his glistening eyes up toward the stars. Please, do not take her away!

  Lorace cradled her as he wept and only his contact with her fluttering spirit confirmed that she still lived.

  “She has surpassed herself,” Lehan said from beside him.

  “Will she survive this?” Lorace asked. Where is my certainty now? My tranquility?

  “She needs to sleep,” Lehan comforted him. “She will be fine, and I daresay, much stronger for the experience. That is the truth of it, Lorace. A mortal spirit is not meant to be the focus of such power, but her strength prevails.”

  “Lorace!” Oen cried, shouldering his brother aside to point out over their bow. “The blight comes!”

  Sir Rindal stepped forward before anyone could react—a commanding presence of righteousness. Lorace relinquished his mate’s delicate form to Falraan’s waiting arms as the paladin scooped up all of the godstone glyphs in his big hands.

  “She will live,” Sir Rindal said. “I need your sight Lorace, now! I cannot see the blight without your help.”

  Lorace nodded. She will live! He reached deep and laid claim to his tranquility once more. He took up Sir Rindal’s turquoise spirit and embraced it with his sight, directing him toward the towering mass of storming blackness sweeping at them, glimmers of emerald flickering deep within its depths. Then he turned the ships so they flew side by side.

  The blight encroached in a rapid flood, mounted high into the sky like an avalanche of darkness. The great expenditure of power they had just witnessed had somehow drawn it to attack.


  Reacting with the calm, quick reflexes of a fighting man, Sir Rindal held up the glyphs in a stack and commanded them to life with a string of strange words. Focusing their power with his colossal will, they did not merely glow brightly as Lorace expected, they pierced the blight of undeath in a solid beam of purest blue-white light. Like a sword at the paladin’s command, he swung the beam in a series of quick slashes that forced the blight to recoil. Everywhere the light struck, the blackness broke up in whirling eddies that dissipated into nothingness or attempted to recombine back into the main body of the blight. Like a wounded animal, it flinched back and tried to evade, but the shaft of light extended to the horizon and Sir Rindal swept it through huge arcs of sky.

  When the beam of light chanced to intersect the mast of their ship, and severed it clean. Flaming at both ends of the cut, the top half of the mast fell. Lorace caught the flaming length of timber in an embrace of air before it could strike the deck and crush the people in its path. He dropped it into the sea below with a splash and a hiss of steam then turned the vessels about so that none lay between the line of Sir Rindal’s sweeping attacks and the fleeing blight that had assailed their flanks.

  The paladin continued to slash unrelentingly until what remained of the blight had retreated beyond the horizon. Only then did he release his command over the glyphs and allowed their glow to fade to a quiescent glimmer that belied their incredible potency. Lorace’s sight revealed that a great swath of the blight was gone, but it remained extended over most of Ousenar and continued to grow outwards from its center at Blackdrake.

  A thunder of sound impinged upon Lorace’s senses, bringing him back to himself. An exuberant cheer rose from each of the four galleys for Sir Rindal’s display. The paladin held the glyphs high that all might behold the fully forged godstone. As one, Prince Wralka and his dwarves knelt in awe at the miracle before them.