Crown of Crystal Flame (48 page)

Steli gave a panting whimper of pain, and Ellysetta tore her gaze from the Light Warriors and set to work healing her pride-mother. Rain arrived a few chimes later, heralded by clouds of boiling flame that incinerated the revenants around the crater’s rim.

«Beylah sallan, shei’tani,»
he sang.
«I was worried I wouldn’t reach you before the revenants did.»

“You almost didn’t,” she told him. “Varian and the others kept them at bay.”

«Varian who? What others?»

She looked up from her healing. There was no one in the crater but herself, Rain, and Steli. Varian and the Light Warriors were gone.

After healing Steli’s shattered bones and organs, Rain flew Ellysetta to tend the other injured tairen. The dragons were dead, but the two youngest tairen had perished with them, and Fahreeta had lost a wing to the dragon queen’s flame. The rest of the pride managed to lift her wounded body and fly it to safety. With his mate wounded, Torasul’s fierce, protective instincts were on full display. He would let none of the Fey or
shei’dalins
approach Fahreeta, leaving Ellysetta to weave a new wing for Fahreeta on her own. With Rain’s help, she managed, but when she was done, they were both near-staggering from exhaustion.

As she and he paused to eat and regain their strength, Ellysetta sliced her hand and rubbed it against her armored thigh and tried to summon Varian again. An army of Light Warriors would be a huge asset to the allies. But none of the Light Warriors answered her call, though to her embarrassment, several of her
lu’tan
came running.

“Sieks’ta,”
she apologized. “I didn’t mean to call you. I was trying to reach someone else.”

Commander Silverleaf, who had taken a brief respite from the sky to rest her Aquiline and heal the wounds that marred his white hide, watched Ellysetta. “They do not come because you are not in peril,” she said.

Ellysetta looked up in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”

“The spirits of your
lu’tan.
The ones who have passed beyond the Veil. They are not your army, to fight on your command. They bound themselves to you in love, by their own free will, not to kill for you, but to defend you from harm.”

“So they won’t come when I call, but if I walked out into a pack of revenants, they would?”

“If you put yourself in peril, they would come, and they would extinguish their own Light to defend yours.” The Elf woman’s eyes were steady and unwavering, giving away nothing. “Is that what you will do?”

“That would be a perversion of their gift, wouldn’t it? To force them to fight, when all they swore was to defend?”

Silverleaf remained silent, and that seemed answer enough.

“I will not abuse the great gift they entrusted to me.”

The Elf neither commended Ellysetta nor condemned her. She simply turned and walked back to her Aquiline, but Ellysetta had the feeling she had just passed a very important test.

Rain and Ellysetta took to the skies once more, and the battle continued well into the night.

To the north, the
dahl’reisen’s
attempts to take out the bowcannon across the river were unsuccessful. The Eld had strewn the ground around them with
sel’dor
dust, which sparked like mad against the
dahl’reisen
invisibility weaves, making them instantly detectable. Between demons, Mages, and
darrokken,
the warriors were slaughtered in a few brutal, bloody chimes of battle.

Earth masters tried to seal the boreholes by turning soil to stone, but the corrosive flesh of the revenants still ate through. The bodies of Elf, Fey,
dahl’reisen,
Aquilines. Shadar, and tairen littered the field, coated in thick layers of black dust from the destroyed revenants.

The allies were exhausted. Bells of nonstop battle, with little rest or food, and no
faerilas
to rejuvenate flagging magical energies, had beaten them down.

And still, the revenants came.

The Pale ~ North Slopes of the Feyls

The slivered crescents of the Mother and Daughter moons rode low in the night sky over the Feyls. Moonrise had brought with it a surge in power for the Mages who had been bombarding the Faering Mists with Mage Fire since their arrival the previous night, and as the night deepened, that surge increased.

Three thousand Mages now stood on the peaks of the Feyls, oblivious to the ice and snow around them. Great, blazing blue-white globes, some the size of tairen, flew through the air, exploding with concussive force against the shifting rainbowed radiance of the Mists. With each blow, the Mists flared bright.

“Keep firing!” Primage Garok shouted over the roar of exploding magic.

Around him, the other Mages continued the barrage, each drawing deep upon his well of magic. Several pooled their power to amass larger globes and send them flying into the Mists.

The magical curtain shuddered beneath the assault, its clouds undulating in frantic waves, bending inward where the concentrated barrage hit hardest.

“Mahl! Rutan! Concentrate!” He spun to address a group of Mages working together to combine their flows of magic into a single, enormous globe of Mage Fire. “Fursk! Keep those Mages channeling power! Make that Fire as big as you can!”

Pale faces strained. Sweat broke out on pallid brows and trickled down the sides of ashen faces. The globe of Mage Fire centered between the thirty-six Primages expanded, growing larger and larger, until they could barely hold it aloft. Shouting with exertion, they heaved the massive sphere towards the Mists, straight into the center of the barrage.

Magic exploded, bolts of searing blue-white light shooting out like cracks of lightning.

For one, shocking, shuddering instant, the Mists thinned, and a small hole appeared at the center of the thinned area. Primage Garok had a clear view straight through the Mists to the snow-capped Feyls on the other side. The edges of the hole fluttered like a tattered sail pierced by a great sword. Then sparks of magic sputtered, and cloudy, rainbow-lit wisps of mist surged inward to fill the empty space, the tendrils reaching for each other like desperate hands reaching across a chasm. The tiny hole in the Mists sealed.

But it had existed.

“It’s working!” Garok crowed. “We need more power. Mahl, Rutan, you and your Mages add your Fire to Fursk’s!”

Seventy-two more Mages joined the circle. The globe of Fire trebled in size. Garok called more Mages to join the others. The ring of magic wielders expanded to one hundred eight, one hundred forty-four, one-eighty. Then at last, the magic number, twelve hundred ninety-six. Thirty-six groups of thirty-six.

The globe of Mage Fire at their center was like nothing Garok had ever seen—or ever even read about in his centuries of existence. As big as a mountain, and nearly as large, hovering over the thirteen hundred Mages like some great, glowing god-sphere.

“Now!” he cried. “Now! Let it fly!”

The Mages bellowed a communal roar and heaved the massive sphere towards the Faering Mists. The Mage Fire sailed up the mountain towards the shimmering curtain. Brilliant, enormous, deadly, the Fire skimmed across the ground, catching the remnants of already battered trees and winking them from existence, leaving a trail of barrenness in its wake.

The massive globe of Fire plowed into the Faering Mists. Energy erupted like an exploding star. The flash of blinding light made Mages scream and cover their eyes. Then came the boom, a roaring wave of sound like the thunder of the gods, and just behind it, a blasting jet of air and magic and pulverized dirt that knocked the Mages to the ground and sent half a score of them flying to their deaths off the side of the mountain, their dwindling shrieks muted by the deafening roar as the Faering Mists rippled and shook, and split in two.

Celieria ~ Orest

A flash of light illuminated the western horizon. All heads turned on the battlefield of Orest as the clouds of Mist riding the top of the Rhakis Mountains suddenly flared with wild, riotous jets of color.

“What’s happening?” someone cried.

The mountain shivered. Celierians closest to the steep slopes screamed and ran for cover as rocks and debris tumbled down towards Upper Orest.

Then the unthinkable happened.

With one last blinding blaze of light, the magical, rainbowlit clouds that hugged the mountaintops collapsed inward upon themselves.

The great and magical barrier of the Faering Mists fell.

“The Mists are down!” someone shouted. “Gods save us, they’ve brought down the Mists!”

For the first time in one thousand years, the Fading Lands lay open and vulnerable to the outside world.

The Pale ~ North Slopes of the Feyls

Garok hadn’t been certain what to expect, but the complete destruction of the Mists was more than he’d dreamed possible. Triumph filled him with exultation.

“They’re down!” one of the other Primages whispered. The whisper grew quickly to a racous, celebratory hurrah. “The Mists are down!”

Garok wasn’t a Mage to waste time on self-congratulation. Getting through the Mists was only the first step. Reaching Dharsa, the core of the hated Fey homeland, was his goal. He’d been suspicious when Maur assigned him this mission, but he intended to make the most of it. When he returned to Eld in triumph as the Mage who’d brought down the Faering Mists and conquered Dharsa, even those Primages still hesitant to turn from Maur would look at him with new eyes.

“Archers to the fore!” he commanded. He paced across the rubble-strewn ground as the archers hurried to step forward. “Take aim! Fire!”

Bowstrings twanged in unison. Mages summoned the wind as a dark rain of
sel’dor
arrows, each modified to hold a
chemar
in the shaft, soared up the mountainside and across the now unprotected peak, disappearing on the opposite side.

Before the last arrow disappeared from view, Garok opened the Well of Souls and the Eld leapt in. The portal closed quickly on the heels of the last man. Within the darkness a fresh array of glowing blue lights lit the Well—the dozens of
chemar
that had found their targets lay before them, mere steps away.

“Primages, you know what to do.” The Eld split into a dozen groups, each racing for a different spot of blue light inside the Well. They opened the portals using the
chemar,
and the instant the portals opened, archers fired more arrows through, while the Mages spun magic to carry the missiles much farther and faster than bowstring alone could have managed.

And so it went. Portals opened. Archers fired. On to the next portal. As they crossed the last line of the snowy volcanic peaks, a roar greeted one of the opening portals and a jet of flame lit up the interior of the Well, burning an entire company of Mages to ash.

The tairen had come to defend their territory. But the
chemar
were too many and the tairen too few. The Eld advanced with swift purpose towards the heart of the Fading Lands, the shining city on the hills.

Dharsa.

The Fading Lands ~ Dharsa

“The Mists are down! The Mages are coming.” Marissya clutched the slight swell of her unborn child as she delivered the news to the Massan. “Sybharukai says they are using the Well to move across the Plains of Corunn. She doesn’t know their numbers, but they’re moving too fast, in too many directions. There aren’t enough of the tairen to stop them. We must ward the city, quickly before it’s too late.”

“Down?” Yulan regarded her in disbelief. “The Mists can’t be down!”

To his credit, Tenn didn’t waste time doubting her word or hesitating in indecision.
«Fey, to arms! Defend the city! The Eld have broken through the Mists.»
To Marissya, he said, “You and Dax take the
fellanas
and the truemates to the Hall of Truth and Healing. Prepare to defend yourselves in case the Eld break through.”

“What about you and Venarra and the rest of the Massan?”

Tenn’s expression turned grim. “When we banished Rain, his duties fell to us. That includes the duty of defending the Fading Lands. Go. Quickly. Venarra, gather the
shei’dalins.
Nuri, Yulan, come with me.”

The Fading Lands ~ Pass of Revan Oreth

“They did it.” Kieran stared at the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Rhakis mountains, visible now for the first time in a millennium. “Those scorching Elden
rultsharts
did it, Kiel. They brought down the Mists.”

«Fey!»
The cry rang out across the new Warrior’s Path.
«Into the pass! Defend the Fading Lands!»

Stone-faced and fire-eyed, Fey warriors shouted,
“Miora felah ti’Feyreisen! Miora felah ti’Feyreisa!”
and ran into the narrow, rocky pass of Revan Oreth. Kiel and Kieran ran with them.

The pass was many miles long, but as the Fey approached the last third of the trail through the mountains they heard the sound of rocks and pebbles tumbling down the mountainside, accompanied by a strange, clattering that echoed in the canyon, like the hard mandibles of millions of stone-shell beetles clicking madly.

«Fey! Weaves at the ready! Steel is useless. Hundred-fold weaves, or straight Earth and Fire only. Cutting them in half only grows two of them, so have a care. Light be with you, my brothers!»

The clattering noise grew louder, until it was nearly deafening. The Fey rounded a sharp curve in the pass, and the sight that awaited them made Kieran’s blood freeze in his veins.

Coming towards them at an astonishing pace and in numbers the likes of which he’d never seen, were creatures. Thousands upon tens of thousands of creatures with grayish-white bodies and bald, eyeless heads. They looked vaguely and grotesquely manlike, and entirely terrifying. As they neared, he could see the wet shine of their sluglike skins, the round, needle-filled holes of their green foaming mouths, the razor-sharp spines of their grasping, clawed hands and feet.

That was the clicking noise. The sounds of those clawed hands and feet scrabbling across rock with their darting speed. Some ran upright along the narrow path, but most raced on the sides of the mountain, covering the sheer cliff faces of the gorge like a monstrous swarm of beetles.