Chapter 19
When the first explosion hit the Doldrum fortress, Elias Solwyn was cornered in his prison cell by his grandfather. Eldric held a truth serum in his hand and was moving toward him.
“There is a way that you could have lied to me. I don’t know how, but you haven’t exactly been very truthful, and I need to know the truth. Otherwise all of this I did for nothing.”
Elias did not want his grandfather to give him that serum. They were not exactly lies he had been hiding. They were truths he had never wanted Eldric to know.
Thankfully, in that moment, the first lightning bolt hit the fortress. A wall shattered. Bricks and rubble everywhere.
All pretense and anger left Eldric’s face. Suddenly he was no longer the headmaster and the unofficial leader of this movement. He was just Elias’s grandfather. He looked at his grandson with worry.
“Stay here. Let me see what’s happening.”
He turned his back to Elias and looked outside. Vanguard soldiers and Doldrum prison guards were moving swiftly.
“We’re under attack,” they said.
Eldric readied himself for combat. It didn’t matter what happened to the rest of the Isles as long as he could get himself and his grandson out of there.
He was beginning to see the error of his ways.
This had truly gone far enough. Even the prime minister had intervened, and now, apparently, Mortandagh too.
Then another lightning bolt hit the fortress wall, and through the shattered remains Eldric could see what was happening outside.
Dark figures in the clouds, robes flailing, hanging suspended, sending attack after attack at the cannons and the defenses of the tower.
He wanted to go out and fight them. Maybe this could be where the war ended. Maybe Mortandagh was out there as well.
He began to unlock the prison cell. He didn’t get to finish.
Behind him, Elias was overcome by a great amount of pain. He screamed and held his hands to his head as it split his skull open.
“Elias, what is happening to you?” Eldric said, leaning next to his grandson.
“It’s hurting. So much pain,” Elias said. He could not compose himself. Blinding agony seared through his body and robbed him of his faculty. He was losing control with each passing second, and something else was taking over—something he had never felt in his life, and yet he knew it by a name.
The pain was suddenly gone.
Elias grinned devilishly at his grandfather.
“I believe this is the end of the path for you,” he said.
He snatched his grandfather’s channeling device and used it to deliver the killing curse upon Eldric Solwyn. It happened so fast that Eldric never got the opportunity to understand what the treachery was. He was dead the next moment, lying splayed in the prison cell.
Elias went to the door, unlocked it with the key he had taken from his grandfather’s body, and started shouting.
“They killed him! They killed my grandfather! Help! Help!”
At the other end of the hallway, he saw Barrowhane commanding a group of soldiers.
“Who did?” Barrowhane screamed.
“Deathless! From this window!” Elias cried, lips quivering, tears spilling down his face.
Barrowhane rushed past him toward the hole in the fortress wall. Deathless spilled through it, throwing spells at him, at Elias, at the rest of the soldiers. Elias ducked and dodged and ran down the winding stairs.
The assault upon the fortress was maddening. He could not believe what he had done. Why had he done it? Why had he killed his grandfather like that, in cold blood?
And yet, as his feet stormed ahead, he realized that it was not him exactly who had done it. There was something controlling him, something commanding his steps, something commanding his voice.
“The Deathless are attacking!” Elias screamed. “Retreat! Retreat to Umbrveyl!”
He dodged the spells that were being exchanged between the Deathless and the security of Doldrum.
And as he dodged, he realized that there was no way he could escape this island without teleportation.
He had never learned how to teleport. He looked around, aghast, and saw little skiffs at the harbor of the Isles.
It was certain death getting aboard one of those and making for shore, but that was the way he was going to do it.
As Elias ran, avoiding the onslaught, he looked back at the Doldrum Isles one last time. The tower had collapsed. There were dead bodies splayed across the courtyard floor and Deathless descending upon the isle, freeing prisoners from within.
This was not a lost cause just yet, Elias thought to himself, with what little freedom he still retained.
I can turn this around. I can get the Sunflame Spear and pierce Mortandagh’s heart with it once more. This time I will kill him by destroying his body bit by bit.
With that thought, he jumped aboard a skiff and captained toward the Aladrian shore.
Trisha Evermore was still sitting with her friend when the attack happened on the fortress. As the walls shattered, Trisha realized what was happening. She quickly roused Lesya from her dazed state.
“Lesya. Lesya. We’re being attacked.”
Lesya was not looking so pale anymore. Her belly was filled with food. Her wounds healed, and her trauma lessened because it was shared with her friend. She had some notion of what was going on. She grew hopeful. Maybe Mortandagh had come to save her finally.
“I don’t have anything. I don’t have my harness, and my bag. It’s all at the manor,” she said desperately.
“No, it’s not,” Trisha said. “When they brought you here, they brought your stuff here too. Let me fetch it for you.”
“Do you know where it is? We can go together.”
“You stay here. Pretend that you’re still locked in. They’re freeing the prisoners.”
Trisha walked off down the hallway, leaving Lesya to her thoughts.
Lesya tried to get out of the cell, but her feet and her hands were still in chains.
There were great cracks in the walls, places where they had shattered.
In those places the Deathless were coming inside the building, infiltrating it by the scores. Some of them saw her and nodded.
“Do you need help?”
“My friend’s coming with my stuff,” she said.
“All right.”
She saw, to her great surprise, that the Deathless descended upon the staircases and went into the prison hallways, opening the cells and letting the prisoners out.
Mad laughter and loud shouting rang through the fortress as prisoners, former Deathless, were released and walked out to join the fray.
Trisha was coming back with all of Lesya’s belongings, including her harness and her clothes.
“Here,” Trisha said, clanging the door shut again.
Lesya changed, put on her harness, checked her bag. It was an enchanted bag that could not be opened or browsed without the owner’s explicit consent. Inside the bag were still her books, the ones she had stolen from Eldric’s library.
“Eldric Solwyn is dead!” somebody screamed.
Lesya saw it was Barrowhane running along the hallway, chasing a bunch of Deathless.
“Eldric Solwyn is dead. Retreat to Umbrveyl.”
And now, one by one, more and more Deathless were swarming inside the building. Just how many people had Mortandagh recruited? Lesya wondered as she followed Trisha down the hall and down the winding staircases.
Barrowhane was ordering the evacuation of the fortress, but when he saw Lesya descending there, he stopped in his tracks at the entrance and threw a curse in her direction. Lesya was far too dazed to remember the principles of dueling at that moment.
“Lesya, look out!” Trisha said, and pushed Lesya off the stairs.
Lesya fell ten feet with a thud, her head hitting the stone floor.
She saw through her dazed vision that Trisha was standing upon the last steps of the staircase, facing Barrowhane.
She sent a series of spells at him, making him retreat.
All around her, more Deathless formed and threw spells at the former professor of Arcane Defense.
Barrowhane cast a long spell with a great area of effect, sending an explosion hurtling through the hall of the fortress. Everything started crumbling. The staircase, enchanted though it was, was not able to hold under such strain of magic, and it fell, taking with it several Deathless and Trisha.
“No!” Lesya screamed as she saw Trisha get buried underneath the rubble, along with dozens of Deathless.
The staircase had collapsed, leaving the place inaccessible.
The rest of the floors were now hanging suspended in limbo.
From those floors peeped several prisoners, trying to think how they were going to get down.
Lesya rushed toward the rubble, forgetting that Barrowhane was still there.
She saw a man climb out, and for a second she could not believe her eyes.
It was Cassian—Cassian who had come back from the dead to save her.
Cassian who was pushing rubble off and picking up a dead companion’s channeling device and casting a spell at Barrowhane.
The spell hit Barrowhane square in the chest, and the man who had been ordering the evacuation of the fortress, the man who had tortured Lesya, collapsed. Died.
“Cassian,” Lesya said, her eyes filling with tears.
But when the man finally turned in her direction, she realized he was old. He had white hair. His features bore remarkable resemblance to Cassian.
The man said, “Who is my son to you?” as he closed the distance. He was heavily scarred and moved with a limp.
“He was my everything,” Lesya said.
“Then you need to come with me,” he said, “and explain what happened to him. Come.”
Lesya looked at the singular hand of the corpse of her best friend, poking out from underneath the rubble.
She pulled at it, and the hand came free of the rest of the corpse.
She screamed at the horror, and instead of retracting from it, she began using her magic to pull away the rubble from Trisha’s corpse, but there was nothing left.
It was flattened, torn into pieces, blood and bone mixed in a mush of red and white.
It was too much for her to see, and she collapsed.
But the man who bore striking resemblance to Cassian, Derleth, wound his arms around her and said, “Come, my child. Let me take you far away from here.”
He teleported, thanks to the breaking of all the anti-magic fields, and took Lesya far away from this place.
When Lesya opened her eyes, it was not to the scene of Umbrveyl or Wilted Hamlet, but to a small town on the seaside.
There was a beach cottage, and two women who looked a lot like Cassian sitting there outside on the porch, looking concerned, yet minding their own business by way of knitting and reading a book.
“Derleth,” one of them said.
“How in the hell?” the other said.
They both stood up and called at the same time, “Moira!”
A woman who was old and yet retained some slivers of her youth stepped out of the cottage and looked at Derleth.
“Moira,” Derleth said. “There was an attack. I was freed. So was everyone.”
The woman didn’t say anything, but walked up to Derleth and hugged him. They were in each other’s arms for a long time as Lesya stood there weeping the loss of her best friend and trying to reconcile what had happened.
“Are you Cassian’s parents?” she asked softly.
“Yes, my child. We are.”
“Then it will be a grief for you to know that your son is dead.”