The angel thrust out a hand, snapped her fingers around El-i-miir's throat and lifted her, choking, from the ground. She kicked out her feet, but couldn't quite make contact with the angel's leg. She reached for Teah's aura, but had become too lightheaded to manipulate it by any useful means. 'I need my hand back,' Teah growled. With a wave of her arm, the silt threw El-i-miir across the room where she crashed into the wall and hit the floor with a thud.
'Stop it,' El-i-miir sobbed. Teah replaced her hand and Seteal's screaming ceased, her agony becoming such that she could no longer spare the breath to vocalise. 'Enough!' El-i-miir shouted. She affiliated Teah's aura and the angel pulled away.
El-i-miir stepped back and Teah's face became one of horror in reflection of her own. She looked at herself panting on the ground across the room, before turning her attention back to Seteal in time to see a white whisp purging its way from any exit it could find.
'Seteal,' El-i-miir asked through Teah's mouth. 'Are you okay?'
'Release her.' Seteal gagged, looking El-i-miir in the eye. 'This is important.'
El-i-miir snapped the cord and Teah turned to her with a look of disgust. 'I should kill you, you miserable little creature.'
'Teah,' Seteal said tiredly, sitting up as streams of white mist flowed from her flesh. 'The task.'
'Of course,' the angel replied. She raised her hands and the mist condensed. It churned about itself, becoming an increasingly dense ball. Teah gesticulated and the ball floated close to her. As it came to hover between her hands, her aura started to shine vividly, allowing El-i-miir to view it properly for the first time. The ball of sieift blasted through the window and vanished so quickly that El-i-miir hadn't been able to follow it with her eyes. 'It's done,' Teah murmured. 'The rest is up to the bird.'
El-i-miir hurried to Seteal's side. 'Are you all right?'
'You should rest for a few days,' Teah cautioned, 'but you won't have suffered any permanent damage.'
'You're a monster,' El-i-miir said in disgust.
Seteal wearily stood and turned to face her. 'You . . . don't ever get to call me selfish. Not ever. I have given everything. You don't get to accuse me of that ever again.' That said, she marched out of the room.
'What the torrid was that?' El-i-miir glared at Teah. 'You talked her into it, didn't you?'
'Seteal is capable of independent thought, you know.' Teah looked at El-i-miir as though she'd just taken a bite out of something rotten. 'She's stronger than you give her credit for.'
'Hey.' El-i-miir snatched at Teah's arm to stop her from leaving. 'You just . . . you need to stay away from these people. Maybe this is all a game to you, but I actually care about them.'
'Why don't you just say what you really want to.' Teah smiled mockingly.
'All right.' El-i-miir took a deep breath and looked up into her eyes. 'Stay away from Ilgrin. We can work things out if you'll give us some space to do so.'
'Really?' Teah raised her eyebrows. 'Poor dear.' The angel petted El-i-miir's cheek condescendingly. 'Your gil-honed abilities are so flawed when it comes to that which you do not wish to see.'
'What?' El-i-miir almost laughed. 'You cannot possibly think he's interested in you.'
Teah bent over and put her lips beside El-i-miir's ear. 'It sure seemed like it when he fucked me.'
El-i-miir fell back against the wall. 'You're not lying.' Her voice shook. And through the swirling mush of lights and streams flowing in and out of Teah's aura, she found strand linking the angel to Ilgrin. 'Oh, Maker.' She covered her mouth in horror. The angel simply laughed and left the room. 'How could he?' El-i-miir squeaked to nobody as she slid down the wall with a broken heart.
*
Seeol's muscles ached, elf owls not being partial to such lengths of time in flight. His wings were better purposed for fluttering about the trees to capture bugs and squash them, not flying endlessly. Seeol stopped atop a slender branch which flexed wildly beneath him. He dug in his talons, breathing heavily and snapping at the bitter-tasting ants biting his feet. They were disgusting. He hated them!
Wondering where he was, Seeol peered through the trees. On account of his brilliant sense of direction, he knew that he'd been flying southeast, but how far he'd come was a mystery. He'd crossed a river at some point, but was yet to breach the woods and escape into the open countryside. Surely it couldn't be too much longer. He'd been flying for days and was so very tired.
Seeol twitched toward a sound in time to see a snake rear back and flash forward. Snakes always seemed to be in such a hurry. A branch snapped and fell toward them at the exact same moment and as the snake's jaws snapped shut they did so around the branch. Seeol shrieked in alarm and took off back into the night.
The thought of El-i-miir kept him going. His heart skipped a beat. Seeol wasn't a fool, having come to accept that she would never feel the same way. She'd made that abundantly clear. Still, love didn't have to be returned for it to be maintained. Thunder tearing through the sky signalled the beginning of a storm and Seeol's flight became laboured as his feathers moistened. He dipped lower and lower until finally he splashed into the mud.
'Is don't not matter, Seteal,' he murmured to himself as he hopped along the ground. 'I am not gonna giving up.'
The world was a dangerous place for an animal so small as Seeol, and it'd taken him a long time to figure out why he'd survived at all. At first he'd thought Seteal had been protecting him, but more recently had come to realise that it was the inner darkness. It had disturbed him greatly at first. If the darkness was protecting him, then it followed that it must've been doing so for a dark purpose. Evil never produced good works. Seeol had learnt that quickly.
A howl rose up from somewhere in the north, but Seeol was fearless. He knew he could not be harmed by any earthly creation. His darkness twisted and recoiled. It was an uneasiness that Seeol was not accustomed to. His stomach turned to lead and despite the pouring rain the world fell silent. Glancing about himself, Seeol found he was quickly overcome by fear. He turned and saw something churning against the wind.
The white mist stood out in the grey of night. Long streaks of lightning illuminated it ever more fearsomely. As the white spilt toward Seeol, he found himself without doubt that it was coming to get him. He lowered his head and hurried on. He beat his wings but couldn't even reach a half stride into the air before splashing back into the mud. He couldn't out run it. He couldn't match it. The white mist bit into his flesh and drained him.
Seeol opened his eyes to find himself in a place of silence. Impenetrable white surrounded him on every side. 'Hello?' he called, but there was no response other than for the white to close in on him. He screamed in fits of agony as a putrid black mist tore away from his body. He rolled about in horror, flapping his drenched wings and screaming. His heart burned and its beat became irregular as the dark film ebbed away from him. Blackness poured out from Seeol's mouth and was snatched up from his flesh only to be devoured by the churning white vacuum.
Golden eyes burst open and Seeol tumbled across the dirt. Above him the sky was black. There were no stars and the lightning had changed. Prolonged strands like purple serpents snapped at the earth where fires came to life and animals became monsters. Despite his disorientation, Seeol tried to regain his senses. There, in the distance . . . but it couldn't be.
The great crevice that cut through the earth, leading down into eternity was only a hundred strides away. Somehow, Seeol had been propelled by the white mist into the borderlands. He was back at the battlefield where Far-a-mael and the Jenjen had made their stand. This was where he'd lost the Devil's Stone--the key to the gates of Hae'Evun.
CHAPTER Seventeen
talons
Seeol bounced cautiously over to the precipice. He knew that doing so may well be risky business. The crevice had almost swallowed him last time. He tried not to look about himself too much. The number of vultures had reduced, most of the bodies having had every last scrap of meat st
ripped from their skeletons. The vast majority were human, the silts having resurrected many of their own before they'd gotten too dead.
Peering over the edge, Seeol momentarily lost his footing, but quickly regained it and watched stones he'd dislodged fall endlessly into the dark. He took a moment to wander about the edge of the pit until finding a spot where he was semi-confident could've been the place where he'd lost his clothing. He pitched forward and opened his wings.
Seeol was immediately confused by the sounds of echoing voices, but he couldn't pinpoint them because they bounced of every surface. He dipped this way and that, inspecting a variety of ledges as he descended. Eventually the light became so poor that even he had trouble making out the shape of the rock face. The voices bouncing around the cavern didn't help either, only serving to confuse his sense of direction.
There was a loud roar as a mass of rocks tumbled down from above and a gush of wind sent Seeol spiralling out of control. A moment later a thick column of purple light blasted passed him and continued down into the distance, thereby illuminating the pit.
Realising that the whisp lightning wouldn't last long, Seeol seized the opportunity to take in his surroundings. Some fifty strides below a group of men harnessed in a network of ropes were searching for something. Twenty strides above them a dusty lump sat precariously balanced on a short ledge. The purple lightning vanished. Leaving a black stain on Seeol's vision, but it couldn't erase what he'd already seen: his trousers.
'Did you see that?' A deep male voice enquired from below. 'I think we might've missed something.' A lantern illuminated his face.
'Are you certain,' an oddly familiar voice replied. 'I don't want to waste any more time down here than we have to.'
'I thought I saw something on the ledge above.'
'I'll hoist you up,' a third and much younger voice chimed in.
'Torrid,' Seeol hissed. The men had also noticed his pants.
'What was that?' the familiar voice said uneasily. Seeol inwardly reprimanded himself for having spoken. If their voices echoed, so too would his. Fortunately the men's attention shifted when a guttural moan erupted from the depths of the pit. 'For the love of Maker! It sounds like the lightning left something down there for us. Let's check out the ledge and get out of here. We can start again tomorrow.'
As quickly as possible, Seeol flew to the ledge and landed atop the trousers. 'What was that?' the younger man cried fearfully at the reverberating sound of Seeol's wings.
'It's just a bat or something,' the deep voice said dismissively. 'Help me with the rope.'
'It didn't sound like a bat to me,' the familiar voice said suspiciously.
After sparing a second to ponder as to how he knew the voice, Seeol dismissed it and decided that there were more important things to worry about. He slithered into the mass of material in search for his right pocket, but his efforts were useless against the weight of the enormous garment. With a final desperate yank, the trousers rolled over and a pocket was revealed. But he'd pulled too hard and before he could do anything about it the pants slid right off the ledge.
There was a gasp of surprise. 'What is that?'
'What's wrong?' The young voice enquired.
'I think . . . yes, a pair of trousers fell on my face,' the deep voice said in bewilderment.
Seeol paced back and forth across the ledge, not sure of what to do. He dove over the edge and snatched at anything he could for a place to land. The owner or the young voice shrieked fearfully and battered Seeol out of his tangled mop of hair. 'There's something in here.'
'Stop being such a baby,' the deep voice chuckled. 'It's just a bat.'
Seeol leapt onto the pants hanging from the man's arm and wriggled into the pocket. He squirmed down into the depths and locked his toes around a cold sphere; the Devil's Stone. He'd found it. 'Enough,' the familiar voice announced. 'I can't see a single thing down here. We'll resume the search tomorrow. Now, unless you plan on keeping those . . .'
'No, they're pretty filthy,' the deep voice replied.
Seeol became weightless as he sailed through the air and into the abyss, trapped within the confines of his pant pocket. Unable to control his fear, he shrieked, flopping back and forth and around and around.
'Wait,' he heard the familiar voice cry out from some distance. 'I know that sound.' In that very moment, Seeol too recognised his voice. It was Phil Yas, the man he'd banished from the Jenjen army for knowingly putting Seteal and El-i-miir in danger.
The voices disappeared into obscurity as Seeol squirmed against the cloth all the while trying to maintain his grip on the Devil's Stone. When he'd finally untangled himself, the sky above was little more than a slither of barely distinguishable grey on black. A thunderous roar deafened him and left his ears ringing. He flew furiously but was bumped aside as a cold scaly head snapped past him followed by a seemingly endless neck.
Increasing numbers of the creatures snapped at Seeol as he flew for freedom, but no amount of distance he put between himself and the creatures seemed to separate him from them. As the light increased steadily, he was able to make out that there was in fact only one monster, but that it had seven heads and ten horns. It had four legs and a long tail. The multi-headed creature tore its way after Seeol and up toward the surface.
The muscles in Seeol's wings burned, but he didn't dare slow down and test the degree to which his darkness would protect him against such a monster. He propelled himself out of the abyss and into the open air, but he did so too late. One of the monster's many heads shot out after him and snapped shut.
Seeol shuddered in the moist darkness of the monster's mouth as it tried to swallow him whole. 'No!' Seeol shouted, losing his grip on the Devil's Stone. It rolled to the back of the monster's throat. 'Is mine!' He dove toward it, but was then pushed farther back as the monster again tried to swallow. Terrified for his life, Seeol bit its massive tongue as hard as he could. The monster's mouth burst open and Seeol was blown out into the night on its hot breath. The stone disappeared down the monster's throat.
Gunfire filled the air. Seeol tumbled across the ground. The sticky saliva had coated his feathers in a layer of dirt and grass. The monster reared up on its hind legs and snapped at a group of some thirty Jenjen soldiers defending a small camp of maroon-coloured military tents. Only when each head had received a bullet, an arrow, or had been severed by a sword did the monster buckle and become silent. 'Yuck,' Seeol grumbled as he tried to flick and flap away the saliva and grime.
'Listen up,' Phil Yas called out to his men when he was certain that the beast was dead. 'I have reason to believe the false prophet is close. It has likely returned to find the very same artefact that King Harundor sent us to retrieve. If you discover it, you must capture it. If you cannot capture it, you are to kill it. Is that clear?' Phil continued once the men had shouted their agreement. 'As for this monster of the deep . . . put it back to the depths from whence it came.'
'No,' Seeol whispered. He had to choose between two equally unfavourable options. Either he revealed himself and the location of the stone to the Jenjen, or he pursued the monster into the pit and attempted to retrieve the stone himself. There would only be one way to do that. He'd have to go inside.
Frozen by uncertainty, Seeol watched as the men lined up to push the giant corpse back toward the abyss. Seeol tried again to shake the saliva out of his feathers, but the stuff was impossibly thick. It occurred to him that even if he could get inside the monster, it was very unlikely he'd be able to find his way back out. There really was only one option.
'Phil,' Seeol cried, racing across the expanse, his feathers too caked for him to have any chance of flying. 'Phil Yas!'
Phil gaped at Seeol as he approached to within a few strides. 'Get it!'
'The stone,' Seeol cried. 'The Devil's Stone; the monster swallowed it.'
'Halt,' Phil barked and the men ceased pushing the monster toward the edge. 'Get the bird.'
For now the stone was safe, but
there was no telling what these men would do to Seeol. He knew how they'd interpret what had taken place when they'd considered him to be the Holy Spirit. They'd blame him for it, none having greater reason to dislike him than Phil.
Seeol scrabbled through the grass. Chunks of land erupted into the air all around him as bullets hit the earth. He was blasted sideways, leapt to his feet, and continued at a feverish pace. An arrow sliced through the air. Seeol fell onto his face, his wings outstretched. Searing pain wove its way up Seeol's leg and he turned to find himself pinned to the earth, his foot buried beneath the dirt from which an arrow protruded. He tore his leg free, to find that only a bloody stump remained where his foot had previously been. Blood squirted from Seeol's leg as he hobbled over to a patch of long grass.
Shock engulfed him. His darkness had failed to protect him. He pushed through the pain as heavy footfall flattened the grass around him and giant hands swept about in search of him. Seeol realised that his life, perhaps for the very first time, was truly in danger. The white whisp had sucked the protective darkness out of him. Seeol felt alone in becoming exactly what he'd always wanted to be: just like everyone else.
'I've got it,' a man cried victoriously, his hand squeezing Seeol and dragging him into the air.
'No,' he cried shakily and bit the man's finger as hard as he could.
Seeol fell back into the grass and started hobbling away. 'Get it!' someone cried. He almost passed out each time his bloodied stump touched the earth, but he kept going all the same. He stumbled, constantly having to flick out his wings to keep balance. He glanced at his foot and found the wound to be clotted with dirt, trailing dark red blotches with every painful step. He felt dizzy.
'Got you,' Phil hissed victoriously, snatching him into the air. Seeol tried to bite him, but the man held him in such a way that he couldn't move his head, having wedged it between two fingers. 'They said I was mad,' he chuckled, 'but I knew that sooner or later you'd come back to find it. A creature of evil would never miss such an opportunity for power, so I came prepared.'