Chapter Eighteen #2
“Those walls look like they contain sel’dor ore,” Gil muttered.
“A cave of some kind?” Bel suggested. “Perhaps burrowed into a sel’dor mine? It would explain why the Fey never sensed the Mages gathering their power.”
“And why the dahl’reisen could never track them back to their lair,” Gaelen agreed.
“Where are the largest sel’dor mines in Eld?” Tajik asked. “If that’s where he is, then those are the first places we should start looking.”
One of the doors opened, and the Mage entered. Inside was an observation room with a window that looked into an adjoining chamber where a young brunette woman lay chained to a flat table. Her eyes were half-closed, and her head lolled on her shoulders in what appeared to be a drugged stupor.
Another door opened on the far side of the room, and four burly guards, their meaty fists clenched around chains, dragged a snarling, naked man into the room by the sel’dor collar clamped around his neck and the manacles that shackled his wrists and ankles.
His pale skin shone with a faint luminescence.
Dark blond hair hung about his shoulders and face in matted tangles.
The moment he caught sight of the woman on the table, his body went still as stone.
His head came up sharply, whipping the hair back away from his face to reveal black Azrahn-filled eyes and a scar that tracked from the corner of his mouth to his left ear.
His nostrils flared like those of a wolf scenting its prey.
Beside Ellysetta, Gaelen stiffened and drew in a hissing breath.
“You know him?” Rain asked.
“Korren vel Dahn. One of the Brotherhood. Six hundred years ago, I sent him into Eld to find the Mages’ lair, but he never returned.”
“Well, looks like he found it,” Gil muttered.
In the scene unfolding in the mirror’s mist, Korren lunged for the woman on the table.
His body had reacted to her presence with unmistakable intent.
Ellysetta gasped and turned her eyes away as the dahl’reisen fell upon the barely conscious woman.
Rain’s hand tightened on hers, and she felt the disgust and shame roiling through him as he forced himself to watch the creature who had once been an honorable warrior of the Fey commit his unspeakable act.
“May his soul burn in the Seventh Hell for all eternity,” Bel whispered in horror.
“Do not judge him so harshly,” Hawksheart said quietly. “It took two hundred years to break him, and madness can turn even the best of men into beasts. He wasn’t the first and he was far from the last.”
Hawksheart’s soft-spoken words made Rain flinch and tighten his grip on Ellysetta. With her face pressed to his throat, she could feel his recoiling horror as clearly as her own. ?You could never do such a thing, shei’tan,? she assured him.
?I could no longer, it’s true,? he answered. ?But before your soul called mine? I slaughtered millions without remorse. What would one more foul crime have mattered??
?It would have mattered, and you would not have done it.?
His lips touched her brow in a tender caress. ?Korren’s deed is done. You can look again.?
Ellysetta turned back in time to see the woman Korren had raped walking with blank-eyed docility behind several servants.
Ellysetta scowled at Hawksheart. “Why are you showing us this? That poor creature is not the woman who gave me birth; nor is Korren vel Dahn my sire.” She’d seen the two shadowy figures of her parents in a dream beside the Bay of Flames a month ago, and neither the unconscious woman nor her rapist could have been one of the couple revealed to her.
“Anio, they are not. She and vel Dahn were but two of many unfortunate souls imprisoned by the High Mage of Eld.”
The scene in the veil of water swirled out of focus.
When it cleared again, they saw the same woman strapped to a birthing table, her face flushed with recent exertions, while the white-haired High Mage of Eld held her newborn son in his arms and spun a swirl of Azrahn-laced magic that drew faint sparkles of answering magic to the surface of the baby’s eyes.
“We already know he’s been trying to breed a Tairen Soul,” Rain said.
“Look more closely,” Hawksheart advised.
The screen shimmered and the woman on the birthing table became a different woman, this one a blond, green-eyed Elf, and the child in the High Mage’s hands became a smaller boy crowned with a shock of thick black hair.
A moment later, a black-haired woman with deep blue eyes wept as she reached for her son.
That mother and child became another, then another and another.
“Not all of the individuals you see are Fey. He’s been breeding you, yes, but he’s been crossing other magical bloodlines as well. Elvish, Fey, Feraz, Eld.”
“Why?”
“To create something stronger…something deadlier than even you, Worldscorcher.”
Rain’s grip tightened around Ellysetta’s fingers. “Ellysetta?”
“She was his first success, though she did not come from his experimental bloodlines.”
Tension fell over the room. Unguarded thoughts—mostly from Rain but from the others as well—whispered across her mind.
Concern edging on fear pressed against her as the warriors digested Hawksheart’s revelations.
Rain and Ellysetta were the most powerful creatures they’d ever known.
If the Mage had created something even stronger than they…
“There are others?” Tajik growled. “Like the Feyreisa?”
“There are others,” Hawksheart confirmed. “But none yet who have successfully come into their full power.”
“He must be stopped,” Bel said.
“Bayas,” Hawksheart agreed. “He must.”
“And yet you and the Elves will not help us,” Rain said in a hard, flat voice.
“We cannot.”
“Convenient.”
The Elf king’s eyes flashed. “It is anything but.” A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“To know a future that you cannot change—that you must merely stand by and witness—to know what must happen and which people you love must suffer or die, and know you must not—you cannot—do anything to stop it…that is neither convenient nor easy, Worldscorcher. Foreknowledge is the gods’ most excruciating form of torture. ”
“So you say,” Gil sneered, “but which of your own loved ones have suffered lately?”
Hawksheart’s expression became a mask that seemed carved of smooth, impermeable Sentinel wood: golden, silent, and emotionless. Except for the burning green fire of his eyes. His hand swung gracefully out, and the elegant, tapered fingers gestured. “These.”
In the shimmering veil, a new image took shape.
A pair of lovers cast in shadow, their skin glowing faintly silver in the darkness.
The man tall, broad shouldered, the woman slender and elegant beside him, her hair a mass of gleaming curls that spilled down her back in fiery waves as his powerful arms clutched her tight.
Ellysetta’s heart skipped a beat as she recognized the couple from her dreams that night by the shores of the Bay of Flames.
Her parents. The tormented souls who had given her birth.
Darkness slashed across the image, and a new, grim picture of the man who was Ellysetta’s sire replaced the other.
He hung limp and bloodied from thick black metal chains.
His head drooped on his chest, and the matted tangle of his black hair draped around his face like a ragged shroud.
Slowly, he looked up, paralyzing her with the blazing green gaze that filled her vision…
pupil-less, radiant green wells of power… tairen’s eyes.
Rain and every member of Ellysetta’s quintet went still, and silence fell over the chamber.
The only sound came from the low chant of Elvish words that seemed to rise from the wood of the chamber walls, as if the Grandfather Sentinel tree were alive and speaking in the low murmur of a host of voices.
To the right of the man, another scene took shape.
Within a bright, well-lit room, the flame-haired Fey woman lay strapped to a birthing table.
She was screaming, her beautiful face creased in anguish as a woman hurried away with a small, swaddled babe.
Sensing his mate’s grief, the chained man roared and lunged against his bonds in helpless fury.
“Blessed gods.” Gaelen’s stunned voice—barely more than a whisper—was the first to break the silence.
“But they died,” Bel protested. “They were lost in the Wars.”
“You know them?” Ellysetta flicked her quintet a quick glance and saw the stunned recognition on their faces. “Who are they?” She turned back to the images of the man and the woman—strangers, yet somehow so familiar—who had given her birth.
“The man is Shannisorran v’En Celay.” Gaelen’s voice was hoarse. “The fiercest warrior ever to walk the Fading Lands. He was my chatok in the Cha Baruk. The woman is his truemate. Her name is—”
“Elfeya.” Tajik sank to his knees. His nails scored bloody lines down his face.
“My sister.” His hands, his face, his entire body was shaking, and power gathered around him in swirling waves.
“The Mage has her? The Mage has my sister?” Slowly, fists clenched, he faced the Elf king.
His eyes had turned to blue flame, and magic flared about him in a flash of near-blinding green light.
The ground rumbled and shifted as Tajik’s Earth magic shook the great Grandfather Sentinel to its deepest roots. “You knew,” he snarled.
“Bayas,” Hawksheart acknowledged without flinching. “I knew.”
Tajik snatched two red Fey’cha from their sheaths and whipped his hands back to throw.
“Tajik, nei!” Gil cried.
Before the Fey’cha could leave Tajik’s hand, Gaelen drove a fist into the side of the Fire master’s head. The red-haired Fey dropped like a stone.
Ellysetta cried out and ran to kneel at Tajik’s side. After checking to verify that the warrior was unharmed, merely unconscious, she cast Gaelen a reproachful look.