Avalyne Series 02: The Easterling (27 page)

One of the creatures
had broken away from the others and was moving to intercept him as he moved from lamp to lamp, anticipating his movements now that she guessed his plan. Aeron saw her approach and lit an arrow with one of the ignited torches before shooting it into her chest. She screeched with pain as her body glowed with the dancing tongues of flames.

From the corner of her eyes, Melia saw another River Daughter closing in on her
Prince and immediately moved to stop the creature before it could reach him.

The River Daughter
flung those terrible tendrils at her and Melia dropped to the smooth floor, pivoting on one knee as she swept the creature’s leg from under her. The former sprite snarled indignantly as she landed hard against her knees but raised her head sharply at Melia, preparing for a renewed assault. Melia did not give her the chance to use those spidery tendrils again and slashed them away with her dagger.  A high pitched scream followed and Melia let out a sigh of relief at the narrow escape.

‘
Melia!’ Aeron suddenly shouted, staring at her in horror.

For a moment she stared back at him in puzzlement
wondering the cause of his panic. Until she felt the tendrils coiling around her and pinning her arms to her side. Unable to move, she saw the River Daughter’s face behind her head and felt her stomach curdle at its fetid breath. Worse still, she could feel the insidious black spines digging into her skin, overwhelming her with a terrible feeling of fatigue. In desperation, Melia threw back her head, connecting with teeth and soft flesh before using every ounce of strength she possessed to tear  herself free.

The tendrils
ripped out of her arms with a sickening snap and both she and the River Daughter scream in pain. However, it was Meila who recovered first as she swung around and faced her attacker. Taking advantage of its disorientation, she swung the dagger in a neat arch and took River Daughter's head. It toppled off her neck, black blood spurting from ruined veins before falling onto the floor with a sickly thud.

When she turned back to Aeron,
he was dispatching another creature by flinging a lamp at it and setting it ablaze. When their eyes made contact, she rewarded him with a smile  of affection. His efforts to set the room on fire had worked and the pods were all engulfed in flame. The room was dancing with the illumination of tall, tongues of  fire and the smoke that filled the air was making it  difficult to breathe or see. They needed to leave this place and the River Daughters to their fate.

Neither could take any pride in
what they had done here even if they knew their actions had saved Avalyne from a monstrous menace. The momentary pleasure Melia had felt seeing that he was in one piece quickly diminished by the realisation that one  of those screams belonged to her mother.

Suddenly, the creature whose fingers
she had taken appeared out of the smoke and flame, closing in on Aeron with surprising speed.  Aeron wasted no time firing the last of his arrows at the creature but despite being wounded and filled with rage, she dispatched them easily. He started  to retreat when the River Daughter closed the distance, nearing him enough to swat  him away like a fly.

‘
PRINCE!’ Melia screamed as she saw him fly through the air from the first blow, landing hard on the floor not far away. Ribs that had only days ago been broken due to his encounter with the ogres, snapped anew, forcing a groan of pain from him. It was a sound that struck cold fear into her heart. All this time, she was worried about outliving  him and the idea he might be killed first never occurred to her.

Despite
the white hot agony flaring in his side, he raised his head at Melia's panicked cry to see the River Daughter advancing on him, not about to let him escape her again. Aeron forced himself to his feet, an uncharacteristic grimace crossing his face as he straightened up to defend himself. He had lost his bow and his sword when the creature had flung him across  the room and searched quickly for them. Finding one weapon however, did not help him for it was on the other side of the room and he would have to go through her to retrieve it.

‘Aeron!’ The watch guard shouted, catching his attention. ‘Catch!’

Aeron turned to see his
sword being flung at him. The Prince hurried forward and caught it with one hand, ignoring the pain in his body as he secured his grip around the hilt and swung it to strike. This time however, the River Daughter avoided the blow and caught him by the throat instead, lifting him off his feet as tendrils emerged from the bloody stumps of her fingers and pierced his chest through his leather jerkin.

The pain that coursed through him was unlike anything he had ever felt. Hot knives penetrate his skin, his muscle and then bone. This was what it felt like to be run through, he thought fleetingly as a cry escaped his lips. He tried desperately to raise
his sword but his strength failed him. It felt as the life was being drained out of his body through the black tendrils. In a matter of seconds, he was overcome with such uncontrollable fatigue he could barely keep his grasp of the hilt. The creature held him above the floor, his feet dangling as she proceeded to crush his throat with her iron grip, a sneer of victory across her face.

Suddenly without warning, a
burning arrow struck her full in the neck.

The quiver tore through her throat, burying the arrow so deeply in her neck it almost
tore through the other side. The arrow took away any chance she had to scream as she let go of him and staggered away, the tendrils withdrawing from his chest. Uttering  gurgling noises through the blood spurting from her mouth, he saw her continuing to struggle until a second arrow flew past him, this one striking her heart and killing her dead.

Melia lowered the bow that felt uncomfortable in her hands. She preferred her own crossbow and no matter how well she might shoot with the one she now held,
it did not feel right. When she saw that Aeron was still on the hands and knees he had landed on, she bolted towards him, skidding to the floor he was presently leaning against. Even with his elven fortitude, Melia knew  he was hurt and hurt badly. He appeared pale and was having trouble getting to his feet.

Yet as she proceeded towards him, something in the corner of her eye caught her attention and she sa
w a hand tearing through the membrane of the one cocoon they had missed.

The one belonging to Ninuie.

Melia could not help but turn around and stare as the cocoon ripped open, its viscous, translucent fluid spreading out around it in a large pool. The River Daughter stood up, like a terrible goddess rising out of the sea. Melia found herself rooted to the spot, unable to move, unable to breathe. She heard Aeron shouting at her distantly but could give him no answer. Melia stared into the face of the creature before and felt a swell of anguish rise from the pit of her stomach to escape in a single, wrenching sob.

The face before her was one she recognized.
She had seen it enough in the mirror.

A
eron forced himself to his feet, ignoring the pain and the difficult of it after the River Daughter had struck him with whatever life draining magic she and her kind had likely used to kill every krisadors in Gahara. All he knew was that he had to move or Melia, blinded by her feelings for her mother, would die if he did not.  He staggered to his feet, forcing them forward and using his sword to reach them both. He was but only a few steps away from when the creature, Ninuie, raised her hand and he felt his strength leave him again. His legs buckled and he was driven to his knees once more as a terrible weight dragged him to the ground.

‘
Melia,’ he managed to croak, ‘she not your mother! Not anymore!’

If anything could snap her out of her momentary lapse, it was seeing Aeron fall and she faced her mother once again and pleaded desperately.
‘Stop it! You are killing him!’

The creature did not seem to register that she had spoken at all and
driven to desperation, Melia tried one more time to reach her mother. 

‘
Mother! Please do not hurt him! Please! If you ever loved me or Hezare! Please stop!’

Until then, the eyes of all the River Daughters did not blink. They stared ahead, like the eyes of predator, all black, seeing nothing and feeling only rage and hatred. However at the mention of Hezare's name, the
creature that was once Ninuie blinked and tilted her head, staring at Melia as if puzzled. For a few seconds, she did nothing but continue to gaze at Melia in unspoken contemplation when suddenly her hand reached for Melia's arm and gripped it tight.

Melia did not know what to think as she felt nails digging into her
arm as she was held securely as the River Daughter leaned forward as if studying her closely. The dark tendrils the River Daughters had used to drain all creatures of their life was nowhere to be seen and Ninuie had all but forgotten about Aeron. Melia wondered if Ninuie was going to kill her for daring to remind the former River Daughter of who she once was.

Melia did not care as long as she left Aeron alone.

But the Ninuie did not kill her. Instead she opened her mouth and spoke.

‘
Hezare.’

******

Images exploded in her mind like blinding flashes of light that made her flinch.

She could feel Ninuie's grip still tight around her
arm but her touch seemed distant, eclipsed by the swirling images appearing before her like she was at the bottom of a pool, trying to look up into the sky. A moment ago, she had been standing in the middle of a monstrous hatchery, pleading for the life of her Prince because his life force was being drained by the creature that was once her mother. She knew she was still in that creature's grip but they were no longer beneath the Gahara Plateau.

Around them,
the wood and its fragrance assaulted her lungs with its fresh scents of moist, living trees and loamy soil. Melia was momentarily disorientated because it was such a stark contrast from the heated air and the stench of noxious smoke in the room she had been only moments ago. However, her confusion was lulled away by the wilderness she had come to know so intimately during her years as a watch guard.

T
he smell was powerful and the heat of the sun overhead was just as intoxicating. Melia would have become lost by its power if she had not known that none of this was real. She still had presence of mind left to understand that this was something that she was seeing in her mind and not any state of reality. Still, for an illusion, it seemed oddly familiar, Melia tried to place it but the memory was too far back in her mind to remember.

She
recognised the Yantra River running past the woods of Eden Halas because after years of searching for Ninuie, she had become familiar with the land. The creature that was her mother was standing next to her, clutching her arm with that claw like grip from earlier but her face gaze was devoid of its earlier malevolence. Instead, she now appeared confused and troubled. In fact, her face displayed a very human expression of anxiety.  Ninuie’s eyes were staring past her and Melia followed her gaze to see she was staring at in the green grass just beyond the banks of the river.

A couple
were lying beneath the shade of a tree. The tree was large, leafy and its branches spread outward like it was trying to catch the rain when the heavens opened up. The man and woman were stretched out beneath the canopy of green, against lush, carpet thick grass, firmly in each other’s embrace, enjoying each other with the carefree abandon of youth. They stared at each other with a love that Melia had only recently come to understand with her Prince. It was rich and all consuming.

The woman with her sheeny dark hair and her luminescent skin surrendered completely to her lover, a handsome man with
dusky skin that glistened with a fine sheen of perspiration from the sun’s heat. With a start, Melia realized that this was her father. For the first few seconds, she almost did not believe what her eyes were showing her. He looked so young and happy. There was no trace of the weathered and seasoned warrior he would become in his later years. Here, he appeared as if nothing could stop him from conquering the world singlehandedly. Melia ached with sadness because she had never known this man.

Of the woman, she had no memory. In what could well be the last moments of her life, she was a
llowed a glimpse into the past and the only memory she would have of Ninuie, as she was. Not this River Daughter who had been turned by a mage’s hubris into a creature that was about to murder her own child.

Still if she was to die, then Melia was grateful
for this final glimpse into the past, of seeing her parents together just once.  They were so happy and she wondered if her mother wrestled with the dilemma of a having a mortal lover the way Aeron was now. She doubted it. Ninuie’s smile of adoration at her father told her that nothing mattered but their time together. Hezare was laughing with joy while Melia wept in sadness, knowing he would never be as happy again.

He loved his daughter but not enough for
his broken heart to ever heal.

The scene before her suddenly melted away, colours
bled into undistinguishable swirl, like someone had thrown a bucket of water at a paining. Melia blinked to refocus but when she opened her eyes, she knew that she looking at something different. The tree was gone but in its place was a small house that sat by the banks of the Yantra with a window that faced the Baffin in the distance. There were small blue flowers in the garden and the cottage reminded Melia of those she had seen in the Green.