Chapter 36
Marek, the God of Storms and Births, does not crave misery as some gods do.
Then again, he is as heartless as the storms that constantly rage along the beaches of Thalovar.
His Godforged were given the power of lightning, but his champion was given more.
To Brandor Halden, he gifted power over the very winds themselves.
~Cedric Penrose, A Treatise on the Gods and Their Powers
Fiona
I look around to make sure that all my teammates are here, and immediately, I know something’s wrong.
“For fuck’s sake,” Rurik snarls. “They ploughin’ killed him. One of those rancid cunts snuck into our rooms while we were in the Great Hall and killed my brother.”
He immediately draws the sword from his hip, but Darian takes hold of his wrist. “They did,” he says calmly. “He’ll Return in a month. It’s not the first time either of you has died, is it?”
Rurik takes a deep breath, but his body’s trembling. “It’s not.”
“Then stop acting like you’ll never see him again and put your sword back in its scabbard. He died, but let’s not all rush to follow him. You knew only one of you could win this, after all.”
The sigh that comes out of Rurik is closer to a snarl, but he does as Darian says. There’s another surprise, one no one else seems concerned about. Elara isn’t standing beside us. She’s riding a pegasus, one of the flying horses which were gifted to the Riders and is where their name comes from.
The pegasus’s dusky gray wings are folded at its sides, resting against steel barding just as thick and shining as Elara’s own plate mail.
Its mane and tail match its wings, a dusky gray against a pure white coat.
Standing taller than any horse in Stormhaven, it’s obvious that there’s nothing natural about the beast, but the intelligence in its eyes truly sets it apart.
It’s one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen, lessened only because I’ve spent so much time with dragons.
We’re standing on a hillside, and I know towers are built at the highest point in the area to give it the best defensive position.
I try to look through the trees, but they’re not the duskthorns we’ve been staring at for more than a month.
These are tall. Oaks and poplars, all of which have full branches of leaves, blot out the sky.
“We need to figure out where the tower is,” Jorren says, his words echoing my thoughts. “Everything that happens for the next three days will center on it, so regardless of whether we’re going to take it early or later, we need to know where it is.”
Everyone nods, most of them probably coming to the same conclusion. “I think flying would be a poor decision,” Elara says. “There’d be no hiding where we are if anyone were looking at the sky.”
“Agreed,” Isola says. “Secrecy is going to be the thing that gets us out of this alive. You can’t hide a pegasus if you’re in the air.”
No one argues that fact, so we begin a brisk walk to the top of the hill. I’m surprised at how green everything is. After over five weeks stuck in the darkened land of Dunloch, it feels surprisingly alive here even in the middle of the night.
We do our best to walk silently, though Darian’s sack makes strange sounds with it slung over his shoulder.
I cringe at every one of them. At any moment, one of our enemies could surprise us.
While the main battles will be for the tower, the other teams won’t hesitate to kill us in the middle of the forest.
It doesn’t take long for us to break out of the treeline and come upon the rocky crest. A tower built like a needle, rising forty feet in the air, stands only a few feet away from us.
There’s no wall around it, but the door is made of thick, steel-reinforced wood.
It couldn’t keep a Chained or Burning One out of it for long, but against a human, it’d be tough to break down without some kind of battering ram.
All along the circular stone walls, there are windows. They aren’t large enough to fit a human body through, but they’re large enough to shoot an arrow or drop a rock from. At the top are battlements, and the flag rises high above the stones on a flagpole.
Nyxthos’s unmistakable black and silver colors flap in the wind, and my heart races. Everyone is going to be looking for the tower, and after only twenty minutes of walking, we’ve found it. I glance at Darian, who shakes his head.
“We could take it now,” I whisper. “We could break the stairs going up. We could…”
“No,” Jorren says. “Absolutely not. We cannot stand three full days of sieges against us. If we were fighting humans, then sure, but that door will not hold against one of the Chained. A Rider could attack the roof. The Undying could age the stone until it turned to dust and just walk in. Our group will not do well trying to hold a position this fragile with our current strengths.”
“I agree,” Darian says quietly. “Nyxthos knows we won’t win that fight, and he’s offered it to us as a temptation. We should take advantage of it, though. Just… not in the way one of the Chained would.”
I cock my brow at him. “What are you thinking?”
He smiles. “I’ll tell you once we get inside.”
Elara glides down from her position at the top of the tower after a grueling hour of preparation. If I’d ever had doubts about Darian’s strategic genius, they’d be gone now.
As he’s done to me too many times to count in Khorra, he made moves I never could have expected. Once again, I learned just how little I know about the magical world as Darian set up magical traps to kill the next group that entered the tower.
He had Rurik use lightning on crystals which he hung from tripwires and placed in specific patterns.
He pulled strange stones out of the sack that Rhion had enchanted to explode and placed them at the base of the staircase.
Trick by surprising trick, he laid a path of destruction from the base of the tower to the top, just waiting to be triggered.
He’d talked me through his thoughts as he placed the traps.
“The Godforged,” he said, “weren’t around when enchanted objects were commonplace.
The House of Steel is a shadow of what it once was, and the Fae aren’t nearly as important any longer.
Our competitors probably don’t even know to look for these kinds of traps. ”
It’s done now, though. Elara leaving her position at the top of the tower on the back of her pegasus means that it’s time to go.
“I’ve been monitoring the movement through the trees, and the closest group is coming from that way,” she whispers as she points toward the northwest. “They’re getting closer, so we should leave if we don’t want a fight.”
Darian nods, and Elara leads us down the south side of the hill back into the trees. We walk for about a mile, far enough away that no one will stumble on us while looking around the tower, but close enough that we can get back once the screaming starts.
Then we sit down and wait.