“Greetings, Tal,” she said cheerily. “I am Aoleyn. Are you of the lake tribes?”
“Talmadge,” he corrected. “And no. Who are you? And why are you here?”
“You should be glad that I am here,” she said, moving to help him with his bindings. “And if you aren’t from the lakemen, then why are you here?”
Before Talmadge could answer, there came a growl and a roar, and Aoleyn turned to see the bear, back to them, shoulders flexing as it swung furiously at something hidden behind its bulk.
“Deamhan Usgar!” Talmadge cried, kicking his feet, sliding away.
Aoleyn shook her head, knowing that could not be the case. The bear was struggling and swatting with all its strength—no man could stand before that power.
Up to its full height went the bear, and Aoleyn expected it to drop upon its foe. But it stayed up high instead and issued something that was not a roar, something that was more a shriek, sounding so strange coming from such a creature.
The bear shuddered and shook, and screamed—that was the only word Aoleyn could think of to describe the ghastly sounds coming from the animal.
It kept shaking, and Aoleyn blinked with shock as she noted a strange bulge in its back. She heard the man Talmadge struggle to his feet behind her, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the spectacle.
A black head with shining red eyes tore through the bear’s back, biting and wriggling, and the monster, the fossa burrowed through.
“By the gods,” Talmadge gasped. “Run!”
“No,” Aoleyn said before she could even consider the question. They could not run, she knew all too well, for she had seen this monster’s charge before.
The demon fossa stared at the duo, stared particularly at her, Aoleyn thought, and she knew the murder in its fire eyes.
The bloody creature, catlike, weasel-like, slinked her way silently, on padded paws.
36
CIRCLE OF LIFE, CIRCLE OF TIME
Aoleyn had no time to think, so she grabbed at the most obvious offensive strike she could muster, and with a stamp of her foot, she called to the gray bars of her anklet, and following her fear, she threw all of her magical strength behind the stroke of lightning.
Blinding light filled the area, along with a reverberating thump of thunder that bounced Aoleyn and Talmadge right off the ground. The bolt flashed out instantly, slamming the fossa.
And the lightning stroke was gone, as quickly as it had arrived, yet the fossa remained, seeming unharmed, perhaps even stronger. The creature did not move, and it appeared to absorb the lightning. As though the fossa simply ate it.
Aoleyn had seen this before, on the battlefield with Brayth, and though this bolt, directly from her and not transmitted through her connection with Brayth, was much stronger, the effect had clearly been much the same.
Barely had the lightning dissipated when the fossa charged, but Aoleyn was not surprised and was already once more into the magic she had pierced upon her body. She changed tactics, going with the blue-white stone, a zircon, on her anklet, and she stamped her foot again, bravely holding her ground as the fossa roared in, as this creature, which could kill with a single bite or swipe of its claw or thrash of its swordlike tail, sped for her with murder burning in its red eyes.
Only at the last moment did Aoleyn fall aside, as the fossa hit her field of ice and went flying past in a wild tumble.
“To me!” she called to Talmadge and he scrambled to her side, and his eyes widened in obvious shock when he took her hand and became weightless, or nearly so! And as Aoleyn rushed him around the far side of the icy ground, again putting the magical field between them and the fossa, Talmadge found his entire body covered in a blue-white glow.
The fossa crashed into the birch tangle, its flailing tail taking down numerous small trees as it flip-flopped through. It came right back out, seeming unharmed and stalking in once again, now with more measured steps.
It paced toward the ice patch.
Aoleyn clutched Talmadge’s hand more tightly, but kept her focus on her gems, on the ring she wore. She shifted it around with her other hand, feeling the pinch of the wedstone fastener, the conduit. She saw the hatefulness in the monster’s eyes, and felt the monster’s focus on her, only her. It knew her, she realized then. It recognized her, and probably from the fight with Brayth, she thought errantly, having no idea that the fossa had tracked her every burst of power from that night when she had first been in the crystal caverns. She swallowed hard, steeling herself against the sudden near-certainty that she was about to die.
The creature stopped just before the ice field, barely ten strides from the two, and began tamping down its hind legs, never blinking, never taking its hateful stare from the witch.
It could clear the ground to her in a single leap, Aoleyn knew.
“Jump,” she whispered to Talmadge. “Straight up. Jump!”
And she loosed the fury of the ruby in her ring, and jumped up beside Talmadge, hand in hand, climbing with the power of the malachite, then calling upon the moonstone to propel them more.
The fossa jumped, too, a mighty, monstrous leap that sent it soaring right into the massive fireball.
Protected by the milky-white serpentine shield, Aoleyn and Talmadge flew out from the flames, above the leaping monster, and up into the tree, where they each grabbed onto a branch.
Below them, the fireball shrunk when it should have been expanding, and kept shrinking fast to nothingness, as if the fossa had simply sucked it inside of itself! Its scraggly fur shed wisps of smoke, little fires even igniting all about its body, as if coming from inside the monster, as if the demon fossa was itself an ember. But again, the monster seemed perfectly unharmed, even looked up and gave a low growl that sounded very much like a taunt to Aoleyn.
She looked down at the creature, standing in the midst of the fog of her burned-off ice field. She and the man named Talmadge weren’t nearly high enough, and couldn’t get high enough, she knew, certain that the fossa could run up this tree. She considered flying away, but she was sure from her earlier grapple with dead Gavina that she could not do that with Talmadge in tow. They’d never go fast enough or get high enough to evade the monster.
Aoleyn simply had no answers here. She had thrown everything, all the destructive power of Usgar, at the fossa, and it stood there unharmed—indeed, it only seemed to have gotten stronger.
And angrier.
They were both dead—or she was, at least.
“Run away,” she told Talmadge. “It wants me. Run away.”
“You can’no be serious!” Talmadge countered, and he ranted on about how he would not leave her.
But Aoleyn wasn’t listening. She thought of her first encounter with the fossa, when Seonagh had saved her, but had been devoured. She couldn’t fight the fossa then or now with fire and lightning and cold, but she could perhaps tie up the creature in a different kind of battle to allow this man, at least, to survive.
“Run away!” she growled at him, and she went to her wedstone and used it to flee her mortal coil—and on instinct, perhaps because this monster looked much like an animal, she brought forth the power of the turquoise, too.
Believing she had no chance, that she would be shattered mentally, at least, and likely devoured thereafter, the stubborn young woman went anyway, throwing her spirit into the fossa, which welcomed her into a yawning darkness.
Instantly, she was back in the anchorless void, staring into the coldness of death, the pit of a horrible infinity. She knew despair, and hopelessness, and cold. So cold!
She felt her life force itself being chewed and frayed, and it took all of her strength to stop it from shattering to shards of black nothingness. She didn’t know how long she could hold out, though, and hoped it would be long enough for the prisoner to get away.
But then she understood that she could not, that the only reason the fossa hadn’t already obliterated her was because it wanted to play with her.
And
taunt her.
With images of Brayth’s death, first of all—Aoleyn watched and felt Brayth die exactly as Brayth had seen it, and felt it, every horrifying chew and cut. Every fear, unimaginable terror, mind-shattering pain.
Brayth had soiled himself and pissed himself, she knew, and figured that she probably had, as well, back in her corporeal body.
Still she held on as Brayth expired, and so the evil creature taunted her some more, putting her into the midst of the terror of a deer it had killed, then the horror of slowly devouring another human, a lakewoman with two humps on her shaped head.
Aoleyn’s soul quivered and nearly fell to pieces, the horrors too ugly to comprehend. She wanted to fight back, and so denied the creature and tried to take command of some part of the creature that it might rend itself.
But there was nothing, nothing to hold onto, nothing to torment, no way to exert her will. She was ungrounded, lost in blackness that had no discernable boundaries, and with no guiding beacon to be found. She was lost in the murderous pleasure of the fossa, in the final moments of horror of its endless stream of victims.
She heard the shriek of a sidhe as the fossa rushed past it, severing its feet to leave it helpless upon the ground, writhing in agony until the fossa circled back to eat.
And then it was not a footless sidhe about to be devoured, but a footless man, an Usgar, splayed on the ground, desperately trying to push past the pain and terror and ready his weapon. She felt his helplessness and fear, felt the internal turmoil as he tried desperately to remember that he was Usgar, a warrior, so that he might gather his courage and dignity in these last moments of his life.
She even heard his voice, his plaintive cry to “Elara!”
Aoleyn started with the surprise of recognition. Not with the word itself, but with the voice. She had no idea of how she knew that voice, but it resonated within her with a distant but clear familiarity. And somehow, this new tragic image unsettled her and threatened to destroy her more so than had the death of Brayth.
The fossa must have sensed that, she realized, for the bloody scene lingered this time and didn’t flash forward to the next kill the demon wanted to display. Just there, where the pain was so intense on this young woman that would be its prey.
But Aoleyn, for all the agony, physical and emotional, didn’t want the fossa to leave, didn’t want to let go of this ugly scene unfolding before her. She felt the man’s pain as if it were her own, both physically and in his soul. He had failed, but it wasn’t his own death that was breaking him. He had failed his wife. He had failed his child.
Aoleyn didn’t understand the significance of that, but in that moment, the man’s pain, her pain, became too much to bear, and she tried to press on, to get the fossa to release this image.
But no, she stayed in this demon memory, lost in the hopelessness and despair.
And she saw herself, drawn and dying, being eaten by the fossa.
But no, she realized, with confusion swelling—was she not lost in the fossa’s memories, or even in the horrifying immediacy of seeing her own certain doom? Was she seeing the future? Yes, this looked like her own last moments: the woman in her mind’s eye looked like her, but an older her. Was she seeing her own doomed and damned future?
Surely she felt the agony as if it were her own, the last fleeting moments of clarity.
Don’t fight the dark! she thought, but wait … Embrace the light!
Confusion cleared when Aoleyn recognized that these were not her thoughts. Was this madness? The last vestiges of coherent consciousness, as with Seonagh?
Then she understood, and the epiphany came not with relief: this was not her death, these were not her thoughts. This was not some vision of her future.
These last moments of life and sanity were not hers at all.
It was a witch, connected to the doomed man as she had been to Brayth. Or was it a ghost, an echo of that woman, taken and trapped within the black pit of hatefulness of the demon fossa?
The doomed man with the voice she somehow knew … the dying woman who looked so much like her …
And Aoleyn knew! But she was too late, alas! For she was falling then, away from the world, away from sanity, and there was nothing to grab onto.
* * *
The thunder rolled up the slopes of Fireach Speuer, shaking and shocking the three Usgar warriors who had been chased away by the giant bear.
Glancing back for signs of continuing pursuit, Tay Aillig saw the flash itself, and knew that it had not come from the sky, that it was not a normal thundercloud from above.
“Usgar?” Egard asked, spinning about and seeing the confusion on the War Leader’s face.
“The fossa,” Aghmor breathed.
But Tay Aillig shook his head. The fossa had never been known to throw magic. The fossa didn’t need magic!
“A witch,” he decided. Had someone followed them from the camp? Mairen came to mind, particularly given the power of that lightning blast. Connebragh, perhaps. No …
For some reason that he couldn’t comprehend, he became certain that it was Aoleyn. The meddlesome young woman was often out of the encampment, he knew. Had she stumbled upon his war party, only to find herself face-to-face with a great brown bear?
He thought of running back down the hill, not out of any love for Aoleyn, of course, but simply to protect the expected gains she could bring. But he couldn’t fight that bear, not with the puny sword he now carried. If he had been wielding a blessed Usgar spear, perhaps …
He shook his head and turned about again, and led the other two off at a run, back up the mountainside, back to the Usgar encampment.
* * *
There came a moment of reprieve, something tangible to grab onto, only for an instant, and Aoleyn didn’t know why, but in that moment of freedom, Aoleyn grabbed at the doomed witch’s thoughts, embraced them, and somehow understood them, or thought she did.
Her fire and lightning and freezing cold had done nothing but deepen the murderous dark that was the fossa.
So Aoleyn embraced the light.
She grabbed the power of her wedstone and cast a wave of healing into the demon beast.
Its discomfort stabbed back at her, and she felt something else, some different reaction, a third entity wrapped within their spiritual combat. The young witch recognized something then, something about what this creature had been! The fossa was not one. It was two, bound as one in darkness, one demonic, one surely not!
She healed it again, and in the ensuing struggle, yanked her spirit free from the fossa’s darkness and flew back to her waiting corporeal form, still in the tree, but now alone. For a brief moment, she thought and hoped that Talmadge had fled, but then she spotted him on the ground beside the demon creature, crawling away on his elbows, dragging torn legs behind him.
He had given her the moment of reprieve! He had leaped upon the monster when she and the fossa had been tangled in a spiritual battle.
Aoleyn couldn’t think of that now, for both their sakes. She grabbed the wedstone on her belly, pressed it hard into her flesh, and threw another healing wave at the fossa. She slid off the branch and caught her fall only enough with the malachite so that she landed lightly on the ground right before the beast.
She was not afraid, for she understood now, and so was too filled with anger to be afraid.
The Usgar on the ground, the witch caught by the fossa in her spiritual embrace with its victim …
The demon fossa had killed her father and eaten the soul of her mother!
The turquoise called to her, as well—showing her that other animal, being trapped with the demon in this broken and monstrous coil—and she reached out again, now with both stones, throwing forth a wave of healing magic and twisting it as if she were tending a broken animal.
She was only a stride from the fossa! It could leap forth and bite her face off!
But no, it couldn’t.
For now the battle was within it. Aoleyn was giving freedom t
o the creature caught within the fossa’s demonic darkness.
The monster went into a horrifying spin, scrabbling, scratching, tearing at the ground, at anything near.
And mostly, at itself.
It spun and leaped and rolled, maddened beyond sensibility. Where Aoleyn’s magic could not harm it, its own claws and teeth did, dragging bloody lines, skin hanging in torn flaps. It bolted all about, left and right, once right over poor Talmadge, who tried to cover up but got flattened and gouged. It rolled past Aoleyn, a ball of pure hatred, and she only barely got to the side in time.
It rolled and leaped and scrambled and darted farther away.
And that was the problem, Aoleyn suddenly understood, for proximity mattered, and as the monster moved farther from her, the demon within the monster regained more control; the darkness swallowed the light.
It charged across the clearing, but not approaching, went up one tree and leaped far away, landing in a ground-tearing fury. It looked briefly back at Aoleyn with most hateful eyes, then it ran into the brush, and the trees shivered with its passing.
Aoleyn ran off after it.
“What are you doing?” poor Talmadge cried.
She tried hard to ignore him. She had to get close, to reestablish the connection, to embrace the light within. But no, she couldn’t begin to pace the monster, and it was running straight away, up the side of the mountain, tearing apart anything in its path.
Aoleyn looked back to the clearing, to the man who was bleeding once again, and then out to the west, where the Blood Moon was setting.
She looked back up the mountainside, to see a distant tree shudder, a black form leaping away, running into the dark night.
She couldn’t hope to catch it.
* * *
It had never felt such a thing before. Such … discord. Cacophony. The music it had sought, twisted around and now less painful, but more profoundly devastating.
Devastating and beautiful, and calling to the other being, the one that did not feel the pain when the red moon was not above, when the music stabbed the tormented demon a million times in a million places.