Chapter Thirty-Seven Elvine #3
“Two futures,” she said. “Two choices, between one that is true, and one that is not.”
“Choice?” Lore’s laughter had an edge to it now. “What choice can there be? A world of wonders or the Vortigurn’s calamity?”
“One is a lie. Something I fancy has been plucked from your mind. This—” she pointed to the flaming Citadel “—is taken from mine. A vision that feels true, while yours is the delusion born of peerless arrogance. You think I would ever stand at your side? You talk of building a new world of wisdom and peace but practise only deceit and cruelty. That is the truth I see here. I think Ilvar and his menda saw it too, did they not?”
Lore’s disappointed scowl became a sneer. “They were weak, in body and mind. They spoke of a phantom in the ice whispering to them, showing them horrors.”
“Horrors they had wrought in your name, I suspect. That’s what it showed them. That’s what they feared. The truth of their own crimes.”
All trace of affection had leached from Lore’s face now, lips quivering in suppressed anger. “I see another truth. The truth that you, despite the love I hold for you, are unworthy of this, the greatest of gifts.”
“I don’t want your gift!” Elvine lurched towards Lore once again, slashing with the spear in a vain attempt to do her injury.
“I wouldn’t accept your love any more than I would a cup of poison…
” She stopped when something flickered in the corner of her eye.
Turning, she found the vision of the Citadel had changed.
Some form of disturbance now swirled the air close to the tower where the two men continued to struggle.
It crackled with energy, blasting forks of lightning into the surrounding sky.
They lanced out from an expanding circle, formed not of light, but darkness.
“So it worked,” Lore said, voice rich in contempt. “All his endless scheming. Centuries of tyranny and manipulation, all directed towards achieving this. He tried to hide it from me, but, for all his pretensions and his years upon this earth, his mind was a child’s, easily read.”
“What is that?” Elvine demanded.
“A tear in the fabric of the world,” Lore said.
“Torn by those on the other side.” She paused, a spasm of discomfort passing across her face.
“The Vortigurn purposely built the Citadel close to another veil, a place where the barrier between worlds is thin. Can’t you feel them?
Their ravening hunger. It has been years in the stoking, and now cannot be sated. ”
As she stared at the expanding black circle at the centre of the maelstrom, Elvine did indeed feel a growing sense of nauseous unease.
The tear exuded an instinctive repugnance akin to recoiling from the sight of maggots feasting upon a corpse, but much more potent.
She could see something moving in the blackness now, something that shimmered as the lightning played over it, conveying an impression of a great many snakes coiling in a pit.
“What are they?” she breathed, possessed by a desperate desire to retreat from this vision. But this place would only allow her to continue to float, forcing her to watch.
“They have names in a thousand tongues,” Lore said.
“In the Altvar Rendi they are the Elborians, those monstrous denizens of the depths banished by the Altvar. But you, Elvine, will know them better as the Malecite so despised by your Covenant of Martyrs. Ever they are drawn to the veils between our worlds, enticed by the endless conflicts of humanity, for discord is their meat. Every once in a while they are presented with a feast, as the Vortigurn intends to do at the Citadel. If he hasn’t already. ”
As she spoke, the writhing dark mass spilled from the tear to flood the flaming street below.
Elvine found it impossible to discern the true shape of the unleashed beings, they moved too fast and seemed to alter their form at will.
She saw flaming people plucked from smoking ruins to be torn apart and consumed.
The black tide overwhelmed the city in the space of a few heartbeats, extinguishing the flames but also destroying every structure in their path.
The screams finally faded but the ravening darkness swept on, multiplying in number as they fed.
“Why?” Elvine turned back to Lore. “What could he possibly gain from this?”
“That has always been known only to him. Perhaps he simply revels in destruction, but I always suspected an unspoken design. It still matters not. Once we claim the knowledge of the Veyinmihr, the Vortigurn and whatever horrors he has conjured will have no hope of standing against us—”
Lore’s words were abruptly smothered by a new sound.
It assailed them from every direction, a vast furious roar.
The two visions shattered around them, dissolving into fragments that swirled then coalesced at blinding speed.
In an instant, Elvine found herself back in the vast cavern.
She stood in the same spot as before, the spear poised to thrust at Lore’s chest, yet now the ice beneath her feet trembled with increasing violence.
“No,” Lore said, her voice a soft plea as she slapped her hands to the ice monolith. “No! You can’t take it from me!”
She drew back her hands to try again, whereupon the monolith moved.
Accumulated frost sloughed away as it convulsed, twisting in a manner more like flesh than ice.
Around them the spiral of protrusions also began to move, sending an intricate web of cracks across the floor of the chamber.
The roar that had assailed them before rose again, rebounding from the glass walls in a deafening echo that forced Elvine to clamp her gloved hands to her ears.
The sound ended when a patch of ice to Lore’s rear shattered and something rose amid the tumbling shards.
Elvine’s first thought was of the head of a massive serpent.
Yet, as it shook itself free of debris, she found herself unable to fully recognise its revealed form.
Its skin rippled constantly, jagged, overlapping splinters shifting and merging as if it was creating itself from surrounding material.
Yet, as it became more complete, she recognised a pair of deep hollows she took for eyes, and below them, a widening, spiked maw.
She expected Lore to run, as Elvine should have.
Instead, they both continued to regard the risen creature with utter amazement.
Elvine supposed it was inevitable that Lore should recover her wits first, or at least enough semblance of thought to speak again.
It was just another faint repetition of “No,” though Elvine considered it as suitable an epitaph as any.
Lore’s slender form came apart into several different pieces, sliced again and again by the creature’s ravening maw.
The remnants flew in a pink mist to spatter the ice around Elvine, causing a moment’s perverse fascination with the sight of steam rising from a chunk of flesh and bone that might have been Lore’s shoulder.
She unfroze when the creature roared again, Elvine’s gaze snapping to the sight of its changing face.
As it loomed closer she felt no fear, her mind filled with the despairing realisation of the truth the Veyinmihr had shown her. The Malecite… Discord is their meat…
“Thera!” Elvine gasped. “I have to stop her!”