Chapter Four #3
A powerful compulsion urged Ellysetta to walk towards the veiled women.
Terrified, she fought the command. Though Rain and the Fey had declared her one of their own, her fear of how a shei’dalin could strip a person’s soul bare had not waned.
Marissya she trusted, but she wasn’t about to submit herself to these unfamiliar
shei’dalins, with their hard-edged voices. Though her body trembled from the effort it took to resist, she managed not to move.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “What is this? And what have you done with Rain?”
A roar sounded overhead, and a cloud of warm air enveloped her, rich with the scent of magic and tairen. Ellie looked up and
gasped with a mix of fear and awe. The sky above was filled with tairen. Jets of flame scorched the air in great, boiling
orange clouds.
One of the tairen—a magnificent, pure black creature with golden eyes and wings that gleamed with an iridescent sheen—circled
behind her and swooped down in a sudden rushing dive. The great cat’s mouth was open in a fierce roar, its massive fangs bared
and dripping venom, its sharp, curving claws fully extended and menacing.
Her heart stopped beating. The predator was diving in for the kill, and she was its prey. For one terrified moment, every
muscle in her body was frozen into place. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move a muscle even to save her own life.
Then the tairen roared again, and the fearsome blast of sound snapped her out of her paralysis. Instinct took over.
Ellie screamed and ran.
Straight into the arms of the waiting shei’dalins.
“No!” She cried out a protest and spun around, desperately seeking escape, but the women had moved too quickly. She was surrounded,
drowning in a sea of scarlet robes. Pale, shining hands reached out. “No!” The shei’dalins’ hands made contact. Their fingers closed in tight, unyielding grips around her wrists, her hands, her arms and shoulders.
“Nei, please, teska. Let me go!” She tugged and writhed but could not break free.
“All who enter will be judged.” The tall one who had spoken earlier took Ellie’s face in her hands. “You will submit,” she
commanded, and Ellie went instantly and utterly still.
The woman flung back her veil, revealing a face of devastating beauty and eyes that burned like firebrands. All around, the
other shei’dalins followed suit. Their power—nothing like the gentle care Marissya had always shown her—invaded her, relentless and unyielding.
Her own consciousness fought back instinctively, strengthening her protective inner weaves, trying desperately to barricade
her mind against them. But they were too many, and the pressure too great. Their insistence beat at her as if the weight of
all the oceans of the world were bearing down upon her, battering her shields like wild waves battering a seawall.
“Do not fight us,” commanded the one who had spoken before. “You cannot win. In the end, we will have what we seek.”
“Nei!” Only to Rain had she ever confessed the terrible, frightening, dark thoughts that sometimes consumed her. And she would not—could
not—fling open those black, violent places to these shei’dalins. She was terrified of what they would find. Terrified of what might happen—to her, to them, to Rain—if they unleashed the
wild, angry power that lived inside her.
“Surrender to us,” the woman insisted.
The pressure grew, multiplied, became unbearable. Within Ellie’s mind, the internal protective weaves Bel had helped her to
rebuild—barriers to keep her thoughts private from even intentional Fey intrusion—stretched and grew thin. Behind them, the
tairen shifted and hissed a warning.
“Surrender,” all the shei’dalins commanded. “Submit and be judged.” There were dozens of them, too many, and their magic was braided in a multi-ply weave
of staggering power.
The first thread in Ellie’s barriers snapped. The remaining threads stretched and shrieked beneath the relentless push of the shei’dalins’ insistent will.
“Stop! Stop! You don’t know what you’re doing! Rain!” She screamed his name in a desperate cry.
Her internal barriers shattered.
Merciless shei’dalin minds poured in through the breach.
The howl of battle swept around Rain like a maelstrom, battering his senses. Screams and shrieks of the dead and dying, hot
gouts of blood splashing over his face, fire, smoke, the burn of sel’dor peppering his flesh. His swords flashed—bright steel, stained with blood, spinning in lethal arcs. Eld, Merellians, Feraz:
All fell beneath the merciless onslaught of his blades.
With sword, with fang, with claw and fiery tairen breath, he killed and killed, and with each death, a layer of heavy coldness
fell upon him. Layer after layer until he was encased in ice. Still, his blades slashed and his fire burned. Still, he slaughtered.
Then it wasn’t only enemies falling beneath his rain of death, but allies as well. Celierians, Elves, Danae. His own brother
Fey. He saw their faces, the shock and betrayal, the disbelief. The pleas for mercy that never came.
All around, amid the gore and violence, stood the pale gray shadows of the dead, watching him with unblinking black eyes.
Their bloodless mouths were open and moving, lips forming sluggish words. Mottled arms lifted. Dead fingers pointed. At him.
And then he heard the whispers. A murmur of sound cutting across the howl of battle, a low hum vibrating across his senses,
felt more than heard.
Murderer. Destroyer. Thief of life.
Bringer of destruction.
He howled a denial, and the fields of accusing dead winked out.
When he could see again, he was flying over a barren, scorched land.
Below him, the city of Dharsa lay in ruins, its gleaming white towers and golden spires heaps of smoldering rubble.
He spun away, raced back across the sky, heading northeast to the great volcanic mountain of Fey’Bahren, home to the last living tairen pride.
But when he reached it, he found fiery, glowing rivers of molten lava pouring down the mountain’s sides like great fountains of blood gushing from a mortal wound.
The nesting lair—the networked maze of caverns and tunnels that had been his home for most of the last thousand years—was destroyed.
Desperate, disbelieving, he flew from one end of the Fading Lands to another. Nothing living remained. Not a single blade
of grass, not the smallest twig, not even the tiniest insect had survived. The Fading Lands were dead, as were the tairen
and the Fey who had called this once-beautiful part of the world home.
“It’s your fault, you know,” a soft voice accused.
His eyes closed. He recognized that voice. He turned slowly, knowing who stood behind him, fearing what image from her life
or death the beings of the Mists might have chosen to torment him with.
Sariel stood before him, slender, luminous, clad in a translucent gown of delicate dusky blue. She was so beautiful. Even
among the exquisite comeliness of other Fey women, she had always been a flower beyond compare. Ebony hair spilled over her
shoulders like skeins of silk, and eyes of deep, drowning blue watched him with sorrow and regret.
The sight of her didn’t rip at his heart the way it always had before Ellysetta. Now, her image only filled him with sadness
for the beautiful Fey maiden whose millennia of life had been cut so short. He had loved her with every fiber of his youthful
being, but that love owned his heart no longer. Rain, the mate of Sariel, had died a thousand years ago on a bloody battlefield
just north of Teleon. A different Rain had risen from the ashes, born the day Ellysetta Baristani’s soul had called out and
his had answered. From that moment on, no other—not even the woman for whom he’d once scorched the world—could lay claim to
any portion of Rain’s heart or soul.
“You brought evil into the Mists,” Sariel accused. “You damned us all.” Her voice was soft, and throbbing with shame and recrimination. Tears filled her eyes, spilled down luminous alabaster cheeks.
“I bring no evil. I bring our salvation,” he replied. “And if you meant to torment me, you chose the wrong form. Rain, the
mate of Sariel, is no more. Now there is only Rainier-Eras, truemate of Ellysetta Feyreisa.”
The Mists must have realized their error. Sariel’s beautiful face wavered. Her body stretched and split, re-forming as a man
and woman. A tall man, fierce-eyed, black-haired, unsmiling. A woman, slender and shining. Beautiful. Beloved. His parents:
Rajahl vel’En Daris and his e’tani, Kiaria.
They were no more real than Sariel had been, but the sight of them was like a knife to his heart. The blade twisted painfully
when the two of them spoke.
“You are a Tairen Soul of the Fey’Bahren pride,” his father said, “sworn to defend our lands against those who wish us harm,
yet you have betrayed us all.” Rajahl wore an expression of stern disapproval and, worse, disappointment—a look Rajahl had
directed at Rain only once or perhaps twice in his entire life, because that look cut Rain so deeply he’d done everything
in his power to ensure that his father never regarded him that way again.
His mother wept. “Oh, my son, my son, better you had died than come to this.”
Even the illusion of their censure seared him. He wanted to cry out in protest, but he did not. He shoved his feelings aside.
Illusion gained strength only when one believed it.
“Show your true face!” he challenged the pair standing before him. “I know my parents do not live in these Mists any more
than Sariel did.”
“We wear the faces of those whose counsel you once sought,” his mother said. “We wear the faces we hope will make you see reason. Listen to us, my son.”
But even as she spoke, her image shimmered. Both she and Rajahl faded, and then it was Johr vel Eilan who stood there, the
Tairen Soul who had been king when Rain first found his wings. Johr, the fearsome, granite-jawed warrior who had led the Fading
Lands for eight hundred years.