Chapter 48 #2
He would not die here, buried with these heathens in the grave they made of their own dark powers.
Desperate, he cast about for the tree-devil and threw himself at her.
She snarled, but he held her down, her strength dampened by raw iron, his bolstered by the virtue of honour.
He threw his body across hers and opened his hands wide, hurling justice upwards.
Fragments of the walls and ceiling—something like stone, but with the grain of wood, and leaking a mist that seemed to devour light—crashed down and shattered against his dome of silver flames.
Each impact rattled his joints and threatened to splinter the bones of his arms, his back, his chest.
From high overhead came a sound that blurred in his ears, baffling all his senses, plunging him into a sudden madness that stretched on and on as the tower fell and the impossible space within it unravelled.
He screamed for Anwe, for Orn, for his mother, weeping and laughing as he held to justice as tightly as he was able, trusting in it to carry him through the maddening chaos.
Silence at last descended. It filled the space left by the last of his screams. Absolute darkness surrounded him.
He thought, perhaps, that this was death.
Not what he had expected. Nor what he had been taught.
But so little was as he had been taught, he was coming to discover.
Rather than an extinguishing of his mind, it seemed that he lingered.
Perhaps he had become the latest ghost to haunt this cursed land.
A terrible thought. One that made him cackle, his voice falling muted against the rubble he held back by the force of his virtue.
That wall of flickering silver alone told him that he still lived.
That, and the twisting and snarling of the tree-devil beneath him, the links of the chain that bound her digging into the flesh and bone of his back.
The rubble shifted. There was a muffled grunt, then a shout. ‘Torin!’
Anwe, somehow alive and unburied. He cried out, and summoned what strength he had left to push against the mountain above him. There was a trickle of black, brackish dust, but that was all. Until a slab of the strange material was heaved upwards and away, revealing a hulking, bloodied silhouette.
At first he panicked, fearing it was the mercenary beholden to the sorceress, until he saw the flickering crown of flame.
Anwe heaved a sigh—of relief, or reshouldering the burden of his leadership—and reached down to him.
He let justice fade, took her hand, and let himself be pulled into the light.
‘And the tree-devil,’ he insisted, his voice cracked and withered.
Anwe glowered at him, but lowered herself into the hole she had made and seized the tree-devil by her iron chains.
Grunting, fresh blood trickling from a thousand small lacerations, Anwe heaved the woman and the weight of raw iron that bound her up and out of the rubble.
As she did so, Torin took in what had become of the green tower and Bryngodre.
The branches of the vast oak had fallen to earth, shattered as though by a terrible wind.
Houses, the inn and countless tents had been crushed in their collapse.
The hill on which Bryngodre stood was gouged and pitted.
People wailed at the night-time sky draped in black clouds, in shock, in pain, in grief.
The trunk of the tree had broken and collapsed into strange, blackened slabs.
Some had fallen inwards, onto Torin, but others had exploded outwards, hurling fragments of the tree and blocks of stone dozens of paces.
They were a simple slate grey now, no longer green and mottled with unsettling, moving shadows.
There was no sign of the slain druidess and her companions, nor Prince Owyn, the Count of Glascoed, the sorceress Fola or her hulking mercenary.
With luck, they would have all been buried in the destruction of the tower.
A dark thought, undeserving of an anakriarch.
Still, he chuckled to himself. In his madness, or desperation, or whatever emotion had driven him to such a self-annihilating impulse, the prince had paved the way for Torin.
‘Get her on her feet,’ he told Anwe. ‘We should be gone from here, back to Afondir and Templar Unwith.’
Anwe settled on a slab of rubble and grunted.
‘Anwe,’ Torin pressed. ‘We cannot linger.’
The Knight of Action regarded Torin with a slow, measured stare. She gestured to the blood seeping down her flanks. ‘If I start dragging the bitch now, I’ll bleed out. Give me a bloody moment to recover.’
A unfamiliar shock pulsed through Torin. Insubordination was unthinkable, and Anwe had resisted him now not once, but twice. Disobedience to an anakriarch, and her ordained commander, flew in the face of Anwe’s virtue of honour. She risked the loss of the Agion’s gifts by this.
‘Very well,’ Torin said, unsure what else to say. He studied Anwe’s wounds more closely. It was difficult to gauge their severity, given what he had witnessed her endure before. Her corona yet burned with the virtue of industry, which sped the healing of her body, and still she bled.
If she died, he would be stranded. For all his skill, all his virtues, all his determination, he lacked the physical brawn to drag a woman draped in chains across Parwys.
There was little hope of prying the answers he needed from the tree-devil here, where he, an outsider and representative of a rival religion, would surely become the target of the grief and wrath of the people who survived in Bryngodre.
He knelt beside Anwe, partly from compassion, partly from desperate need, and placed a hand on her flank where the bleeding seemed worst. ‘By Beren, Agion of Fidelity,’ he murmured, and felt some of her pain and weariness wash into him.
Better that they share the burden of her wounds, he reasoned, though his mind slowed and blurred and his body sagged beneath deepening fatigue.
When he had taken all the suffering from Anwe that he could, he stood, steadying himself on a piece of rubble. ‘We have to move,’ he said, his voice thick, the words slow in coming. ‘Can you stand?’
She murmured, but did not move. Torin looked out over the wreckage of the town and watched bedraggled, wounded people pick their way by torchlight around fallen branches that sprawled like the limbs of some slain, mutilated god.
Perhaps from this they would learn the folly of their hubris.
No matter how potent the cast-offs of the First Folk, no matter how useful they seemed, using them to compensate for mortalkind’s weakness and viciousness would always end thus.
In misuse. In a facade of power collapsing into misery and death.
A startling thought arose from the miasma of his pain and fatigue.
His own powers—the cleansing ritual that ought to have burned away the evils that clung like cobwebs to Parwys—had collapsed just the same.
These heathens had believed in their tree, their altar, their tower, their stones as fervently as he believed in the virtues and the Agion.
Which had failed him, defying all he had been taught, all he had understood.
There were many powers in the world, it seemed to him then.
As many as there were minds to build them up, and use them, and see them fail.
True power lay in the delusional step after such a failure.
The continued belief in a doctrine proven false, or flawed.
In crowning a king while the forest boiled with rebellion.
In rebuilding a fallen tower, replanting a shattered tree.
Burying a bloodstained past, like a king’s blade in his barrow.
Incoherent thoughts. Musings, he told himself, trying to quiet them though they roared louder and louder in his aching brain.
He had wielded justice, hadn’t he, to hold back the rain of debris?
Had, by fidelity, taken some of Anwe’s pain.
The power of the Agion was true, and real.
The evidence of it lay in the world and in his memory—in his very life, which would have ended long ago without it.
He simply did not understand it. Perhaps no one, truly, understood the weave of powers in the world.
Yet those maddening thoughts refused to leave him.
He would not succumb, not accept them, no matter how they twisted his stomach and agonised his soul.
They had become a terrible pain, one he could only relieve by the answers that lay within the tree-devil’s mind.
He turned away from the ruin and back to Anwe and the tree-devil, ready to prod them to departure.
Behind them, atop the crushed remnant of the red brick tunnel that had once bridged the wider world and the smaller one within the green tower, stood the sorceress Fola, bloodied and battered herself, with a book in one hand and a pen in the other.