Magic's Genesis- The Grey

by Rosaire Bushey

  “By this time tomorrow we will be invaded, or we will have defended successfully.”

  Nethyal’s comment came without criticism. “I have spoken to the knight commander and suggested he increase the watch and prepare his troops.”

  Wynter couldn’t suppress a short laugh. “I’m sure he appreciated your assistance.” Since inviting Keldon to be the knight commander, Nethyal had been nothing but cold to the soldier. At every opportunity he would make suggestions to the larger man, and Wynter knew, from having known soldiers all his life, that the sight of Nethyal coming in his direction bothered his giant knight. The animosity was not bitter, but it was there, and it served the king well, Wynter believed, if his two advisors were constantly seeking an edge against the other.

  “Husband, you fool…”

  Wynter closed his eyes and tuned her out almost immediately. It was indicative of his state that she made it through at all, and food and rest were needed. “I think I will take some food and then head to my rooms – would be so kind as to help me and bring my dinner, Nethyal?”

  The Eifen nodded mutely and collected the food and offered a hand to Wynter’s elbow.

  “Why have the Pillars changed colors, sire?” Nethyal asked the question as they moved past the last pillar before moving up the stairs to Wynter’s private rooms. The question was out of character and it sent a tingle down Wynter’s spine. He lifted the water skin as if to drink.

  “No! Don’t drink that, you fool. Kill him now!”

  Instinctively Wynter used his remaining strength and pushed himself away from Nethyal, who not being prepared for such a move stumbled backward to the throne but managed to reach for a small dark knife before his movement fully stopped.

  “So, is this how it’s to end, Nethyal?” Wynter lifted the water skin and sniffed. “Snowberry? Poison seems rather beneath you.”

  Nethyal wasted no time talking and attacked with the small knife in his right hand and another knife in his left, lunging straight at Wynter with each hand carving through the air so as not to present an easily parried target.

  No, stranger to knives, Wynter moved backwards carefully, blunting the Eifen’s onslaught by binding the man’s clothing, a simple use of benign magic, but one he felt nonetheless in his weakened state. Using one knife to cut the clothing that bound his legs, Nethyal threw the larger steel blade toward Wynter with a speed that caught the king entirely off guard. The blade embedded itself in Wynter’s shoulder and the pain reinvigorated the assassin’s instincts. With tremendous ease, Wynter lunged forward and caught the wrist of his attacker and crouched under Nethyal’s chest, hurling him across the floor to crash into a blood red pillar closest to his throne.

  With the blade still in his shoulder, Wynter smiled as he approached, throwing up his arms and pinning Nethyal to the floor with invisible hands. The magic was taking its toll and Wynter could feel himself grow weary, so he grasped the hilt of the knife in his skin and twisted, gaining clarity and power through the pain scorching through his arm and chest.

  “Why now, Nethyal? Why? The enemy is nearly upon us and our glory is at hand.”

  “People deserve better than to be fattened like cows for slaughter.” Rising on his left arm, Nethyal lunged from the floor, using the pillar to help propel him toward Wynter, the black knife edge leading and pointed toward the wielder’s heart.

  “You were right, come to me now.”

  Nethyal’s momentum couldn’t be stopped as a small wall studded with pointed daggers of frozen water broke through the floor and the Eifen’s body slammed into the surface, impaling himself in a half dozen places. The warrior’s blood coated the deadly sheet of ice in a red that seemed brilliant against the larger pillars. Nethyal hung in the air supported by fist-thick icicles and watched the last of his breath spread out before him. He turned his eyes toward Wynter, who stood behind the wall as if he too had been impaled, and then his ears tilted back against the side of his head and Wynter heard him utter only, “sister” before the steam of his breath ceased.

  Wynter looked at the man as he registered Nethyal’s final word and dropped to the floor, narrowly escaping the arrow that crashed through the space he had just occupied. He immediately created a small wall in the middle of the throne room - wood and stone stacked nearby flying of their own volition to impede the progress of any intruder. The diversion allowed him to reach deep into the ice and with his wife’s help, call forth the First Pillar.

  FORTY-NINE

  Keldon met the company at the castle and sent Malai with Relin to parlay with Ahlric’s forces while Branch and Krieger guarded the entrance to the castle. “There is no place for you in this fight, my friend,” Keldon said to Krieger as Lydria and Haidrea followed the giant, using his body as a shield.

  The throne room was everything they had been told and more as 14 enormous pillars of green, blue and red lined the central aisle. Hastily erected wooden beams stood next to the Fourteen serving as additional support for the arched roof above, and stacks of stone and wood lined the aisles on either side of the pillars. Keldon fired a crossbow bolt down the middle of the room as he burst through the door, tossing the heavy weapon aside as stone and wood flew from the sides of the room and assembled into a crude wall in front of them. Seconds later the floor began to shake and a green pillar to the left of Lydria cracked like a tree being felled. Without thinking, Lydria put up a shield around the three of them, protecting them from the ice shards that flew from the wreckage of the first pillar a heartbeat later.

  Keldon slipped to the left to put himself between the new danger and Lydria and Haidrea, giving both women time to traverse the wall in front of them and hunt down Wynter. Haidrea was already scaling the wall which was about the same height as Keldon, and when she reached the top her eyes focused on a small tributary of blood that she followed to a small pool underneath of a man who could only be her brother.

  “Nethyal?” Haidrea didn’t shout the word, but Lydria heard in her voice the same trembling disbelief she had heard so often when she was young. Men who had fought together for years, watching one of their fellows fall, and despite seeing the truth of it, not being able to believe their eyes.

  Torn between chasing Haidrea and helping Keldon, she called out to the large knight who had taken the enormous sword from his back and was circling with a green beast half the size of a horse with the wings of a bird, a long tail and a snout full of dagger-sized teeth. Amidst the green scales of its skin, shone a blue collar like her own.

  “Go,” shouted Keldon, sensing her hesitation. “Find Wynter and kill him if you can. I will deal with this beast.” Keldon’s enormous sword was in front of him now and his eyes were wide. Keldon was in his element as he brandished his mighty sword, and as he began his first swing Lydria removed her shield and climbed over the barricade, forcing herself not to look back.

  Forward was no better. Haidrea knelt on the blood-soaked floor near a man who was clearly dead, several large spikes of ice protruding through him and holding him off the ground. Haidrea looked up and urged her to find Wynter. “I will help Keldon – I know this beast he fights though I know not how it came to be here.”

  Haidrea stood and held Lydria’s right wrist and placed a deep black knife in her palm. It was the knife Wae Ilsit had gifted Nethyal when he left to find Wynter, Lydria realized, and it was warm in her hand. “Nethyal was holding this when he fought Wynter,” Haidrea explained quietly, “This is a Farn’Nethyn blade, there is none finer.” Haidrea squeezed Lydria’s shoulders and ran back to the wall to help Keldon.

  Lydria looked quickly at Nethyal and turned to the single dark doorway where Wynter must have run. She raised her shield again, holding the black blade in her right hand and calling forth a small sphere from her left, providing a low but cheerful blue light that seeped into every corner of the hall. Taking a calming breath, she moved into the Cobalt Tower.

  The tower was very tall, but not wide and there was but a single stairway ringing the outsid
e wall. In a tower such as this, the light would only serve to warn Wynter of her arrival, so she extinguished it but kept her shield in front of her, quietly and carefully navigating the steps with her left shoulder to the wall and moving slowly to peer over each landing as she passed.

  The tower was obviously meant solely for Wynter as there were no corridors or even other staircases. As each landing revealed its purpose but not its occupant, she continued. Only after passing three landings did she notice a window on an otherwise empty floor and she stopped to look to a sky lightening toward dawn. The red mound of the sun was peeking above the tundra to the east and sparkling off the still water of the lake. It would be worth sitting to watch the sun rise. It was calming, but after a moment, she squared her shoulders and started back up the staircase, confident in what must be done and knowing that she alone could do it. “This is what it must feel like to be the first upon a castle’s walls,” she thought. “It is very liberating.”

  A window near the stairs showed her a glimpse of Ahlric’s army. Hundreds of small fires dotted the tundra, just below a small rise visible only from her current height. The fires suggested a large force, but they burned uninterrupted. No soldiers crossed in front of them to make them flicker. The army, she knew, still slept, but with the sunrise, the camp would start to move, and when it did it would come north.

  As she approached the final landing, the stairs ended. Looking up, Lydria could see the curved ice beams that held up the pointed roof of the tower. All of it was a deep blue, which reflected the growing light into patches of dark shadow matched only by the blade in her hand.

  Moving more slowly, she peered cautiously over the threshold of the floor and saw Wynter staring out a window, also looking at Ahlric’s army, she guessed. The room was thick with rugs and furniture. A large desk, several chairs, a lounge, a bed, and several empty cages on the floor following the curve of the wall near the stair opening. There were windows in the walls here, looking out in wide views from the cardinal directions. They were wide windows, not tall and narrow as the windows below and they were covered with what must have been a thin, perfectly clear sheet of ice, as no sound reached them from the outside.

  Lydria put her first foot on the landing and the room was instantly bathed in light. Lydria could see at once this must have been Wynter’s private quarters. There were clothes in neat piles, and a bow hung on the wall like a trophy with a quiver of arrows hung on an ice spike beneath it. Where Wynter stood, in front of the window, however, there was nothing, and without turning he spoke.

  “So, what will you do now Lydria? Will you kill me? Do you think you can?” Wynter turned to her and she recoiled slightly, looking not at his face but at the knife still embedded in his shoulder. He smiled and grasped the knife handle and twisted slightly curling up his face in exquisite pain that brought the feeling of power flooding back to him. She could see the ravaging burn marks and scars on his face and wondered how he managed to walk, let alone run a kingdom. Men with burns such as Wynter’s generally did not live long. The pain was immense and when the pain didn’t kill, the infection such wounds brought, did. Lydria put the black blade in a belt at her side.

  Wynter cocked his head slightly. He was used to the looks people gave him when they looked at his face and he could discern between pity, and horror. What he saw now, however, was not something he had seen before – sorrow. “She is weak. Look at how she sees you, she thinks you are in pain and she wants to help you. She’s even put away her weapon. Let her approach and kill her!”

  Wynter answered his wife out loud, never taking his eyes from the green and blue eyes of the woman before him. “I knew she would come to me, my dear. I told you she would.”

  Lydria knew he was not talking to her but spoke as though he were. “How did you know?” Lydria sidestepped her way into the room, away from the hole in the floor that led to the stairway and into the center of the room.

  “Of course, you came.” Wynter bored his eyes into Lydria and he spoke every word as if it were a spear aimed at her heart. “That old crone, Haustis, she came for me and died in the attempt. You will too.”

  “Haustis arrived at your gates with me.”

  The comment caught Wynter off guard and he reached up to twist the knife in his shoulder again but instead drew it out and threw it at Lydria, not like one would throw a knife, but like a random object, out of spite and malice. It stopped a foot in front of Lydria’s chest and fell to the ground. Wynter laughed out loud. He was impressed and genuinely happy to have someone with whom he could discuss magic. “How long can you do that?”

  “How long can you throw knives?”

  Knowing the woman hadn’t followed him to talk about their powers, he folded his arms in front of him, the white scar on his forearm visible and shining against the redness of the rest of his arm. “What makes you think you can harm me? I have brought to life the greatest creature this world has ever seen and even now, he dines on my commander in the throne room below.

  “Haustis. Keldon. Your… father? Was it? They all died by my hand. You will be no different.”

  Lydria had moved very slowly forward, coming closer to Wynter. In his condition, she reasoned, a close-in fight might be more favorable to her. Wielder or not, he could be stabbed, or hit, or his scarred face and arms handled in such a way as to leave him a writhing mass of pain. All the options were agreeable to her and upon hearing her father’s name, it came as only a small surprise to both, that Lydria sprang at Wynter and clutched her hands on either side of his face.

  The pain from his burns immediately raced to his nerves and he screamed, while at the same time, pulling items from the room and smashing them uselessly into Lydria’s shield before finally causing the floor beneath her feet to melt away and re-freeze, locking her in place with ice above her ankles.

  “Now you have her, husband. Finish this.”

  Unable to move, Lydria could feel her grasp on Wynter’s face and neck failing as he moved away, her fingernails drawing blood as she desperately tried to maintain her grip. If he moved away, she might not get a second chance. Wynter continued to move backward, grabbing Lydria’s wrists, but the scraping of her nails was torture to him. As Wynter started to move up to get her away from his face, Lydria’s fingers slipped as they crossed the collar on Wynter’s neck, and she knew that to defeat him, she could not let go. Desperately holding to his neck, Lydria watched as Wynter’s eyes shifted as if he were listening to the voice in his head again. It was a motion she had seen before, from other men as they called out for their mothers before they died, and she knew what needed to be done.

  Locking eyes with Wynter, Lydria focused her magic and nine long nails grew from her fingers and plunged into her enemy’s neck, holding him tight, causing him to redouble his screams and loosen his grip on her wrists.

  Lydria realized she couldn’t kill Wynter with magic.

  “Perhaps I can heal you instead.” As Wynter screamed, Lydria encased him in a pure golden healing light that flowed from her fingers directly into his head.

  Lydria followed the light with her thoughts, swimming down a tunnel of light into his head as images screamed past her eyes, replaying scenes from Wynter’s life. She saw images of his first kill, of him sighting an arrow, of a young Krieger showing him how to dispose of a body, of watching bodies being cut open slowly and deliberately. She saw him laughing with a baby, and working in his shop, she saw him put an arrow in a woman, and she watched the fingertips of a young boy recede under the water. She saw Wynter cry, and she felt the rage build in him until at last the movement stopped and she found herself in a boundless room of light.

  “What are you doing here? How did you get here?” A woman’s voice reached out to Lydria through the connection they now shared in Wynter’s mind. Her voice was rasping, as if she couldn’t get enough air to flow across the dry leaves of her lungs. She sounded hollow and bitter.

  “I’m here to help Wynter, to heal him.” Lydria knew from the i
nformation flowing into her as part of Wynter’s subconscious, that the speaker was his wife, the woman sitting on the bed with the child – the woman Wynter had killed. She was like a shadow in Lydria’s sight; a spot of darkness untouched and unharmed by the healing light she poured into Wynter. The room the two women shared in his mind seemed more real than the one shared by Lydria and Wynter where the assassin still screamed out in pain, while desperately, vainly trying to remove the nine needles from his face and neck.

  In her battle, Lydria threw magic spears at the dark shape of Ellaster and they dissolved; she tried crushing the shape with conjured boulders and the darkness seeped between them. Anything Lydria tried, simply passed through the darkness.

  “You can’t defeat us. Even now, while you’re here, Wynter is preparing to sever your hands. But by coming here, you’ve given me a wonderful idea of what we’ll do with you. I don’t think you’ll die; I think we’ll keep you here and feed off your power – I will break your mind and then you can defend this forsaken wasteland as a mindless, handless, but living reminder of what happens when you cross us. We’ll leave you buried knee-deep in ice while we go south and create an empire.”

  Outside, Lydria could see Wynter working through his pain and pulling out a small knife, preparing to make good on Ellaster’s threat to cut off her hands. Slowly, Wynter was digging the blade past her shield and she felt the first prick of its bite as it made its way through the skin of her left wrist.

  In desperation, Lydria reached out to Kimi and through his eyes saw he was running to the town. She watched the early morning shadows fall back as the sun rose in the sky and still he ran, trying to reach her.

  Remembering the light that had surrounded Kimi when they met, Lydria lowered her shield and focused all her attention and power into healing Wynter, oblivious of the grinding metal blade that scraped its way across her wrist to the bone.