CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #5
At last, Rain managed to sink his fangs into the dragon’s long neck. The touch blistered his muzzle and tongue, but he held on with grim determination and pumped venom into her veins until the creature went limp.
With a roar, he released her.
The dragon plummeted earthward. Limbs limp, dead wings fluttered like pennants tied to a falling rock as down the body of the great beast fell.
She landed on the battlements of Orest with a mighty crash, shearing the whole of Maiden’s Gate off the side of the mountain and taking four full batteries of bowcannon and thousands of Eld troops with it.
With a scream of triumph and vengeance, Rain followed close behind her, tairen fire boiling from his muzzle to scorch the remaining bowcannons.
* * *
Ellysetta laid a hand on Steli’s broken body and flooded her with a wave of healing and strength to ease the great cat’s labored breathing.
From beneath half-closed lids, the cat’s dimming eyes regarded Ellysetta with mute suffering.
The dragon had struck a mortal blow. Steli’s body was shattered and losing blood rapidly.
What wasn’t pouring out through the gaping holes ripped into her hide was flooding her lungs and chest cavity. Steli was dying.
Howling, shrieking with savage bloodlust, the revenants were closing in.
They had already reached the edges of the crater.
Ellysetta stared up in horror at their round maws, filled with row upon row of needle-sharp teeth, that gnashed and bubbled with frothy green slime.
They moved with shocking speed, their clawed hands and feet gouging into rock and dirt for traction.
The monsters would be upon them before she managed to do more than stop the worst of Steli’s internal bleeding.
?Rain!? she cried. ?Help us.? “Hang on, Steli,” she begged.
She’d cut her fingers throwing Fey’cha at the dragon queen, and she wiped the blood off on her armored leg before holding her hands over Steli and summoning her healing magic.
Please, gods, please, she prayed in silence as she sent her consciousness and healing Light into her beloved pride-mother.
A golden light gleamed at the corner of her eye. Ellysetta turned, expecting to find one of the Elves, only to gasp at the sight of a Fey warrior, gleaming bright as the sun. But it was the sight of the warrior’s radiant, unearthly beautiful face that left Ellysetta stunned.
“Varian?” It was him. The dahl’reisen—one of the first thirty-six who’d sacrificed his life for her in the Verlaine.
She’d felt him die, heard the song in his soul as he passed through the Veil.
And yet, here he stood, impossibly beautiful, unscarred, unburdened by the shame that had weighed so heavy upon him.
His skin shone like the sun, and eyes were filled with such boundless love and serenity she wanted to weep with joy.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “How can you be here? “
“None shall harm you while in life or death I have power to prevent it,” he said, and his voice tolled like a great bell, resonant and pure.
“This I did swear with my own life’s blood, in Fire and Air and Earth and Water, in Spirit and in Azrahn.
” He drew his sword. The blade blazed with a radiance so bright Ellysetta had to cover her eyes.
“Summon the others, kem’falla. Touch your blood to the bloodsworn steel. Quickly.”
Rising to her feet, Ellysetta pulled a Fey’cha from the harness across her chest and sliced her palm deep. Pain stung for a brief, sharp instant, then blood welled, bright red and plentiful. She coated both hands and smeared them across her armor’s shining steel.
All around her, bubbles of strange mist appeared like clouds of sunlight, golden bright and radiant.
The clouds expanded until they became a ring of light surrounding Ellysetta and Steli that coalesced into the forms of a hundred shining Fey warriors, former rasa and dahl’reisen lu’tan, standing side by side, each clad in golden armor that gleamed like the sun.
“Heal her, kem’falla,” he urged. “We will keep you safe.” Varian raised his sword high overhead. “For love and for Light!” he cried. “Miora felah ti’Feyreisa! ”
The ring of Light Warriors echoed his cry, and together, they plunged towards the oncoming revenants.
Their swords sliced through the unholy throng, and unlike steel which merely split the hideous creatures and left them to regenerate into twice the threat, the Light Warriors’ swords, like the arrows of the Elves, turned the revenants to clouds of harmless black dust.
Steli gave a panting whimper of pain, and Ellysetta tore her gaze from the Light Warriors and set to work healing her pride-mother. Rain arrived a few chimes later, heralded by clouds of boiling flame that incinerated the revenants around the crater’s rim.
?Beylah sallan, shei’tani,? he sang. ?I was worried I wouldn’t reach you before the revenants did.?
“You almost didn’t,” she told him. “Varian and the others kept them at bay.”
?Varian who? What others??
She looked up from her healing. There was no one in the crater but herself, Rain, and Steli. Varian and the Light Warriors were gone.
After healing Steli’s shattered bones and organs, Rain flew Ellysetta to tend the other injured tairen.
The dragons were dead, but the two youngest tairen had perished with them, and Fahreeta had lost a wing to the dragon queen’s flame.
The rest of the pride managed to lift her wounded body and fly it to safety.
With his mate wounded, Torasul’s fierce, protective instincts were on full display.
He would let none of the Fey or shei’dalins approach Fahreeta, leaving Ellysetta to weave a new wing for Fahreeta on her own.
With Rain’s help, she managed, but when she was done, they were both near-staggering from exhaustion.
As she and he paused to eat and regain their strength, Ellysetta sliced her hand and rubbed it against her armored thigh and tried to summon Varian again.
An army of Light Warriors would be a huge asset to the allies.
But none of the Light Warriors answered her call, though to her embarrassment, several of her lu’tan came running.
“Sieks’ta,” she apologized. “I didn’t mean to call you. I was trying to reach someone else.”
Commander Silverleaf, who had taken a brief respite from the sky to rest her Aquiline and heal the wounds that marred his white hide, watched Ellysetta. “They do not come because you are not in peril,” she said.
Ellysetta looked up in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”
“The spirits of your lu’tan. The ones who have passed beyond the Veil. They are not your army, to fight on your command. They bound themselves to you in love, by their own free will, not to kill for you, but to defend you from harm.”
“So they won’t come when I call, but if I walked out into a pack of revenants, they would?”
“If you put yourself in peril, they would come, and they would extinguish their own Light to defend yours.” The Elf woman’s eyes were steady and unwavering, giving away nothing. “Is that what you will do?”
“That would be a perversion of their gift, wouldn’t it? To force them to fight, when all they swore was to defend?”
Silverleaf remained silent, and that seemed answer enough.
“I will not abuse the great gift they entrusted to me.”
The Elf neither commended Ellysetta nor condemned her. She simply turned and walked back to her Aquiline, but Ellysetta had the feeling she had just passed a very important test.
Rain and Ellysetta took to the skies once more, and the battle continued well into the night.
To the north, the dahl’reisen’s attempts to take out the bowcannon across the river were unsuccessful.
The Eld had strewn the ground around them with sel’dor dust, which sparked like mad against the dahl’reisen invisibility weaves, making them instantly detectable.
Between demons, Mages, and darrokken, the warriors were slaughtered in a few brutal, bloody chimes of battle.
Earth masters tried to seal the boreholes by turning soil to stone, but the corrosive flesh of the revenants still ate through. The bodies of Elf, Fey, dahl’reisen, Aquilines. Shadar, and tairen littered the field, coated in thick layers of black dust from the destroyed revenants.
The allies were exhausted. Bells of nonstop battle, with little rest or food, and no faerilas to rejuvenate flagging magical energies, had beaten them down.
And still, the revenants came.
The Pale ~ North Slopes of the Feyls
The slivered crescents of the Mother and Daughter moons rode low in the night sky over the Feyls.
Moonrise had brought with it a surge in power for the Mages who had been bombarding the Faering Mists with Mage Fire since their arrival the previous night, and as the night deepened, that surge increased.
Three thousand Mages now stood on the peaks of the Feyls, oblivious to the ice and snow around them.
Great, blazing blue-white globes, some the size of tairen, flew through the air, exploding with concussive force against the shifting rainbowed radiance of the Mists.
With each blow, the Mists flared bright.
“Keep firing!” Primage Garok shouted over the roar of exploding magic.
Around him, the other Mages continued the barrage, each drawing deep upon his well of magic. Several pooled their power to amass larger globes and send them flying into the Mists.
The magical curtain shuddered beneath the assault, its clouds undulating in frantic waves, bending inward where the concentrated barrage hit hardest.
“Mahl! Rutan! Concentrate!” He spun to address a group of Mages working together to combine their flows of magic into a single, enormous globe of Mage Fire. “Fursk! Keep those Mages channeling power! Make that Fire as big as you can!”
Pale faces strained. Sweat broke out on pallid brows and trickled down the sides of ashen faces.
The globe of Mage Fire centered between the thirty-six Primages expanded, growing larger and larger, until they could barely hold it aloft.
Shouting with exertion, they heaved the massive sphere towards the Mists, straight into the center of the barrage.
Magic exploded, bolts of searing blue-white light shooting out like cracks of lightning.
For one, shocking, shuddering instant, the Mists thinned, and a small hole appeared at the center of the thinned area.
Primage Garok had a clear view straight through the Mists to the snow-capped Feyls on the other side.
The edges of the hole fluttered like a tattered sail pierced by a great sword.
Then sparks of magic sputtered, and cloudy, rainbow-lit wisps of mist surged inward to fill the empty space, the tendrils reaching for each other like desperate hands reaching across a chasm. The tiny hole in the Mists sealed.
But it had existed.
“It’s working!” Garok crowed. “We need more power. Mahl, Rutan, you and your Mages add your Fire to Fursk’s!”
Seventy-two more Mages joined the circle.
The globe of Fire trebled in size. Garok called more Mages to join the others.
The ring of magic wielders expanded to one hundred eight, one hundred forty-four, one-eighty.
Then at last, the magic number, twelve hundred ninety-six. Thirty-six groups of thirty-six.
The globe of Mage Fire at their center was like nothing Garok had ever seen—or ever even read about in his centuries of existence. As big as a mountain, and nearly as large, hovering over the thirteen hundred Mages like some great, glowing god-sphere.
“Now!” he cried. “Now! Let it fly!”
The Mages bellowed a communal roar and heaved the massive sphere towards the Faering Mists.
The Mage Fire sailed up the mountain towards the shimmering curtain.
Brilliant, enormous, deadly, the Fire skimmed across the ground, catching the remnants of already battered trees and winking them from existence, leaving a trail of barrenness in its wake.
The massive globe of Fire plowed into the Faering Mists.
Energy erupted like an exploding star. The flash of blinding light made Mages scream and cover their eyes.
Then came the boom, a roaring wave of sound like the thunder of the gods, and just behind it, a blasting jet of air and magic and pulverized dirt that knocked the Mages to the ground and sent half a score of them flying to their deaths off the side of the mountain, their dwindling shrieks muted by the deafening roar as the Faering Mists rippled and shook, and split in two.
Celieria ~ Orest
A flash of light illuminated the western horizon. All heads turned on the battlefield of Orest as the clouds of Mist riding the top of the Rhakis Mountains suddenly flared with wild, riotous jets of color.
“What’s happening?” someone cried.
The mountain shivered. Celierians closest to the steep slopes screamed and ran for cover as rocks and debris tumbled down towards Upper Orest.
Then the unthinkable happened.
With one last blinding blaze of light, the magical, rainbowlit clouds that hugged the mountaintops collapsed inward upon themselves.
The great and magical barrier of the Faering Mists fell.
“The Mists are down!” someone shouted. “Gods save us, they’ve brought down the Mists!”
For the first time in one thousand years, the Fading Lands lay open and vulnerable to the outside world.