TWOLAS - 08 - Stormed Fortress

  Now, the haunt's warring rage laced the terrain like shed lightning. Set into flux by the tidal bore of its fury, the solid earth would shimmer, then vanish into chaotic patchwork. Sometimes, such vistas framed fragments of memory, tinted by wistful nostalgia: places where dragons had sailed the world's winds, or danced in exuberant, winged aerobatics. Then, Seshkrozchiel's outstretched pinions would glide above forests of towering, summer-crowned oaks. The breeze of her passage rustled green leaves, or else sliced against the screaming gales that combed clouds over serried peaks. Her shadow might ripple across slopes chiselled under groaning, white glaciers. Othertimes, the haunt's recollection shaped an expanse of violet ocean, hurled into spume by a squall, or spread as a dimpled mirror of calm, under streamers of gold sunset cirrus. Flight scribed through the vault of limitless blue skies, noisy with flocking birds, or twisted through updraughts and thunder-head ramparts. At times, tail sculling in serpentine loops, Seshkrozchiel drifted, serene, above deserts clustered with delicate thorn plants. The hillocks lay paint-box purple and mauve, with dry river-beds that stabbed sudden, sun-caught reflections off mica and glittering mineral.

  Always, her might flowed across the haunt's errant current of thought. Where she passed, its unquiet creation would fade into shimmering rainbows, then resurge, knitted back into the wintry wilds of Scarpdale.

  The shift occurred without visible seam. So precise was the living dragon's restraint on encounter with outside awareness, she dropped nothing: no fragment of chert, no bounding hare, and no flying hawk over frost-dormant tussocks. Not even the sleeping mouse in its den became lost from the face of existence. Seshkrozchiel sensed the template for their return: every frail leaf on its unbudded twig, and each rustling stalk of dead grass. Such presence emerged, individually intact. The passage of wind, cloud, and puddle, and the angle of sun's moving shadow resolved, past reproach for the haunt's renegade interruption.

  Yet the dragon knew naught of the creatures she shaped, though her eye imprinted detail with rhythms of memorized poetry: she could number the rings on the carapaces of the tortoises, buried in hibernation, and puzzle together the fragments of egg-shells that had hatched nestling birds the past spring. Despite that vast repertoire, she could not recognize the current of spirit made voice, that underpinned a live being. Her ear could not fathom the tuned identity in the vibration struck off a crystal. Seshkrozchiel enacted these things in command of a masterful majesty, but as a mirror would copy reflections. The unfoldment of Scarpdale occurred by rote, a glorious discipline of assembled nuance, unbiased by cognizant empathy.

  Her emotions detected no harmonious communion. Such was the nature given to dragons since the embodiment of Ath's creation.

  Today marked the advent of perilous change. As Seshkrozchiel raked through the spiralling vortex sown by the haunt's enraged spirit, she carried the bargain struck with a Fellowship Sorcerer.

  Once she had loaned her vast power to Davien, enabling his translation from spirit back into flesh. Now, as her price, called in to curb the desecration arisen from Mankind's mishandling of four dragonets, the Sorcerer's fused being embellished the moving enactment of her awareness. All that Seshkrozchiel perceived shared the dynamic of Davien's experience.

  She had always recognized the functionality, busyness, and streams of synergistic purpose, where life flourished in crowding abundance. She understood complex efficiency. But this upsurge of surprised pleasure was novel: Davien's joyful delight in the juxtaposed tumble of landscapes shocked the accustomed range of her senses.

  'Beauty,' Davien supplied, as she queried what was inexplicable.

  His human appreciation was utterly new. The artistic leap, found in colour and form, and the esoteric thrill that sparked in response to resplendent invention was not dragon. Which bursting discovery wrought wonder and change: Seshkrozchiel grappled a concept that altered her innate perception. Another aspect of symmetry bloomed, heretofore unknown to her kind.

  'Attend Scarpdale's wholeness!' Davien sent in reminder. The intent they pursued must not lapse into bemusement. Else the naked influence of the dead dragon would seize ascendancy and destroy Athera's myriad continuity. Already, the fabric of Lanshire's dales failed to resurge into flawless stability. Seshkrozchiel soared ahead, tail flukes lashing. Her intense cogitation generated energies that fuelled the coruscating flame of her aura: and something stayed wrong. Flux emanation streamed from her dorsal spines, as she skimmed the breeze above a verdant prairie. Elk bounded beneath, scattering song-birds. The thickened air languished with late-summer heat, and a clicking chorus of insects.

  Davien damped his alarm. Added emotion could only inflame the drake's divergent attention.

  'Hunting a thing,' Seshkrozchiel responded. Then, with a snarl that snapped off static charge, 'Here! Drakespawn. Their presence has acquired an unnatural life by - ? - not dragon. This anomaly snarls my weaving - ? - ? - is a discord past my understanding. Human perhaps, and not beauty.'

  The grasses rippled beneath her stretched wing leather, stirred by no errant gust. The predators that had chased the elk herd to flight pursued at a bounding sprint. Their bodies were sinuous black. Manes like lions' spilled over slab shoulders that were larger, and more dreadfully lethal. If the Seardluin that gorged on the thrill of blood slaughter were now expunged from Athera, the creatures still prowled in the timeless memory of dragons. Seshkrozchiel was too wise to reshape their forms to run rampant. She unmade the scene where the predators stalked. Yet despite her care, a faint texture remained. The hazy patch lingered, spreading a stain upon Scarpdale's restored continuity. The oddity confounded her effort.

  Whatever had mixed with the haunt's remnant fury eluded her peerless experience. She could not restructure the imprint found here, which persisted on flowering havoc.

  Yet the Sorcerer's sensibilities recognized the copper-sharp reek of pure fear. This thread was human, and most hideously lost in a sharp-focused morass of terror. Before Davien could recoil, the dragon's empathic dreaming captured his distress and loomed the reaction. Creation ensued. The dun landscape of Scarpdale unravelled, stone and tree and frost-hardened earth replaced: by five horsemen outfitted in Hanshire guard's colours pounding at a breakneck gallop over the copper crest of a dune. Their mounts rolled wild eyes. Soaked coats spattered white strings of lather. Hard after the horses' streaming tails streaked the pack of Seardluin, slit eyes fixed in chase as they closed in for slavering massacre.

  Davien knew, cause to consequence, that the graphic impression stamped by their kill could reverberate to infinity. Too late: faster than warning logic, the electrified fright of the victims wracked him into hapless concert. Without flesh to slow his sympathetic response, the mortal reflex to survive joined the naked thrust of the trauma. Agile emotion leaped into sympathy, and drowned, identity thrown into blinding eclipse.

  The leading Seardluin bunched its hindquarters and sprang.

  'Sorcerer! Beware! I cannot hold your essence against such an onslaught!' This vivid encounter with human despair far outstripped Seshkrozchiel's experience.

  Davien heard her distress. His stunned wits strove and failed to wrest clear. Where a being enfleshed used stark panic to focus, the displaced spirit convulsed in response with no footing to react. Swept into the intensity of forming event, the discorporate Sorcerer had no shield to deflect the impact of riveted terror.

  No choice remained except to reach through. Ride the tide's crest, while grasping for the fragmented template of the riders' personalities. Before death on the claws of a predator's blood-lust, these men had memories. They once knew family; had been someone cherished, with the hopes and workaday disappointments that made up a human experience. Somewhere, forgotten, they owned a true Name in the fullness of Ath's creation. The horses, as well, had been foals by their dams, frisking amid emerald pastures.

  Davien thrashed, consumed by terror as the dream's volatile interface exploded around him. Struggle fed the tumultuous torrent as the first lancer fel
l, and pain joined into the clout of reactive sensation.

  No haven existed. Only death and shocked fright, endlessly swirled into an ever-more-magnified echo. All but unravelled, Davien sought the referent matrix of stone. The artistry that had built the haven at Kewar snatched for that protective retreat: a time when his own cry of intolerable anguish sought solace within the Mathorn Mountains. Mineral moved to an altered interface: slower, more staid, intricate in attentiveness, its nature could absorb the back-lashing storm without losing stability. Snugged into the frame of a pebble, frozen into a winter stream-bed, the Sorcerer coiled back into himself. There, he found, watching, the burning gold eye of Seshkrozchiel, laced through his being.

  The dragon had traced his meteoric misstep. A wing-beat, two, and her meticulous awareness restored Scarpdale's familiar serenity. Trees and dales resurged without any harm done in consequence. Yet the stain, now identified as a human remain, stayed sealed in the weave, congealed into latent potential.

  'Haunts left by your kind,' came Seshkrozchiel's thought. 'The dropped thread of their being cannot be spun free of the angry one's dreaming without the grace of Paravian presence.'

  A circle of Athlien dancers could untangle these mortally shocked spirits, but no such benefit lay at hand, now. As a spark lodged in stone, surrounded by the snap-frozen patterns of five dying horsemen's rank horror, Davien surveyed the predicament. 'These lancers were lost in the Korias grimward. Not here!'

  Seshkrozchiel snorted a tendril of flame, impatience, perhaps, or else drakish amusement. 'And have your colleagues not used the skulls of our dead for convenience, as portals of crossing?'

  "That's Asandir's purview!' Davien snapped, tart. 'He's our preferred expert on working through the unpleasant quirks found in grimwards.' Knowledge did nothing to ease present quandary, that the chaos traversed through Seshkrozchiel's partnership was infinitely permeable, as well as reactively telepathic.

  Neither was Davien an accomplished masterbard, with the talent to sound the harmonic balance that soothed fright and traumatized pain. Where such gifted empathy might strike the individualized notes to recapture a mazed spirit's identity, a discorporate Sorcerer possessed no earthly form to wrest a salvage from drake-spun insanity.

  'My sight holds these beings,' Seshkrozchiel offered.

  No progress without risk: 'Show me,' Davien responded.

  A hillside dissolved into a snap-frozen tableau, as her precision remembrance mapped horses, marked so, each one differentiated beyond their white stockings and head blazes. Seshkrozchiel respun them in exhaustive detail: from each blacksmith's nail that crimped on steel shoes, to the odd whorls in each sweated coat. The riders likewise bore distinctions: here, a ring with a topaz setting adorned a grimed finger, and there, a man's corded neck was strung with a luck charm. One veteran's nicked gauntlets had fiend banes stamped in tin, and another carried a wash-leather bag containing a worn set of dice. The fellow who turned his fraught glance behind had a scar, remnant of a tumble in childhood. Each blazoned surcoat and horse-troop's accoutrement was worn with unique flair: the gallant demarked from the dour field sergeant, and the insouciant braggart announced by the cocky hang of his weaponry.

  Davien weighed the information, as stone: Kharadmon would have split himself, laughing, and worse, Luhaine's lugubrious nature would have revelled in such tedious nuance. Patient through desperation, Davien surveyed each being, stilled at the cusp before the agony of violent dismemberment.

  The man's ring seemed the opportune place to begin. Metal imprinted emotion most easily, and gemstone would speak to pebble in congruent resonance. The genius that crafted the maze under Kewar well knew how to bare the most hidden facets of character. Davien tapped the ornament's setting and let topaz speak of the wearer, days before this seized fist lashed to drive a frenzied mount for more speed . . .

  * * *

  . . . and like a whisper embedded in calm, the jewel disclosed a gift received from a sweetheart, as a summer-time pledge for an autumn marriage. The trace imprint of the woman embodied contentment, while her intimate smile fore-promised delight. . .

  * * *

  Where Davien would have reached for the woman as mirror to seek out the name of the man, Seshkrozchiel's fascination swerved sidewards and plumbed the female yearning displayed by the mate. Dragon embraced those human particulars. Entranced into focus, her power of active creation unfurled.

  The remembrance of the rider's beloved appeared as though enfleshed within the dream's setting. Wistful, she stood, her hand outstretched, and her blue eyes filled with the unassuaged sorrow caused by her soldier's parting. She cried out for her husband, torn by her heart's longing. That charge of pure need resounded across the trapped rider's inchoate terror: and the lost heard her voice. Love's potent desire unfurled through the morass, and cascaded change through the polarized flux.

  Now, the beleaguered man stood on foot, hard-breathing, bewildered, but cleared in deliverance as the arms of his wife closed around him.

  Davien snatched the moment, spoke a swift warding to shield the man's presence, as the essence of self came untangled. Cut free of over-reactive emotion, the dead man's stripped spirit recouped his forgotten autonomy, even as his wife's memory vanished.

  'Why am I here?' he asked in distress. 'What fell nightmare entrapped me? I left Valdie at home and rode out on patrol. We were hunting the Master of Shadow.'

  'You entered a grimward,' Davien responded. 'There can be no earthly return from this place. To escape, you must claim the grace of your Name and cross over by way of Fate's Wheel.'

  'Death?' said the man. Displaced in the dream, he regarded his welted hand, still wearing the token bestowed by his heart's beloved. 'My Valdie will be left to mourn as a widow?'

  Davien bolstered his warding with all the tenderness left in the gifted ring. 'Pass on. You will encounter your sweetheart again. The gateway at death is only another form of beginning. Turn around. Step back through, into the hills of Athera. You will find a light there, and a guardian waiting to ease trauma and show the way.'

  The guardsman fingered his mauled surcoat, uncertain. The oathsworn duty he owed to Hanshire ought not to stay unfulfilled. 'We never took down the Spinner of Darkness, or captured the minstrel whose seditious ballads encouraged corruption.'

  Davien chose not to argue philosophy or denounce the cause against Arithon's life as unjust. "There's no punishment waiting, no failure,' he encouraged instead. "The seat of your being arises from a source that embraces all lives without bias.'

  'You know this?' The man looked up, torn.

  'Don't rest on my promise,' Davien replied. 'Step through and find out for yourself'

  While the yellow eye of Seshkrozchiel looked on, the battered rider turned on his heel. With Scarpdale's winter vista a short pace away, he took his reprieve from the harrows of nightmare, moved on by choice, and the dreaming released him. Whatever awaited, his spirit form faded, recouped through a natural crossing.

  'Four more haunts that were human remain, and five beasts.' The dragon's admonishment shimmered with urgency. Scarpdale's threatened stability could not be redressed before each shade's sundered course was resolved. More, the worst yet lay ahead: a fury that raged beyond reach of the hope spoken by the flutes of the Athlien dancers. Grimwarded haunts were recalcitrant beings, stubbornly wedded to vengeance: an impasse Seshkrozchiel's might must contest in irreversible challenge.

  * * *

  For Asandir, the maelstrom whipped against his set will without let-up. Now hunched in the lee of a volcanic rock, he tugged free of the drifted sand miring his feet. He had lost sense of time. Nothing resembling diurnal rhythms existed to measure existence. Darkness and daylight occurred without pattern, and the weather changed at the caprice of the haunt's maddened dreaming. One moment, his skin would be needled with sleet, lashed by a punishing gale. The next breath might bake him beneath glaring sun, or choke him with fouled air poisoned with ash.

  Blisters and injuries
were sluggish to heal, with his resources taxed to depletion.

  Right-handed, he held the fleck of starred light that remained of his cherished black stallion. 'I will see you clear,' he reaffirmed, coughing through the rasp of volcanic cinders.

  He had to move. Rising gusts made his shelter untenable. The face of the boulder that once gave him refuge now caught pelting sand as a death-trap.

  How many times had Isfarenn nudged him ahead, as his weary steps stumbled or faltered? For how many leagues had the horse borne his tired weight, thrashed by the ugly, unbiddable spite that blasted the elements to primeval havoc? Loyal of heart, more than generous of spirit, the stallion had served until muscle and bravery gave out, for a companion too spent to heal him.

  Tears of regret could not ease that sorrow. Some short-falls could never be rectified.

  Asandir would not relinquish his protective hold on the horse's spirit, though such loyalty drove him to ruin. Beyond the rock, the gale shrilled, unrelenting. The Sorcerer wrapped his frayed mantle over his face. Punched and buffeted, he pressed into the tumbling gyre, groping forward as a man blinded. To think at all was to embrace despair, outfaced as the sliifting grim landscape transformed into ever more vicious hazards at whim. Always, the rugged conditions got worse near the centre-pin of the spiral. Asandir clutched the spark that remained of the stallion one dogged stride after the next.

  No telling how far he had yet to go, and no use to dwell on the failure, that his raw toil here must be repeated. At cost of his care for Isfarenn, he could not divide his resources, even to seal the breached grimward behind him.

  Sethvir's wasting attrition would suffer the brunt.