The Flame of Wrath (27 page)

             
“Where the sun sleeps!” Rapier repeated earnestly. She tried moving first one foot and then the other, but her legs were vanishing before her eyes. She was growing lost in this world of borrowed time.

             
“The son?” Maven began her passionate ascent of the stairs. “Whose son?” She lunged up the last few stairs only to have them disappear from beneath her very feet. She plummeted downward, falling against the bridge.

             
Maven felt the air whoosh from her body as she made brutal impact with the bridge. She wrapped her arms around her body. Her face twisted in sadness and pain. Struggling against her aches, she fought to make it to her feet. She limped her first few steps. Her vision was blurred by the tears rising inside her eyes. Rapier's voice still echoed inside her ears. Was Rapier really gone?

             
As the Queen crossed the bridge, she thought her mind had finally fled from sanity. She saw the charred bodies of many of her men lining the ground. Many others were slowly rising to their feet. Her eyes widened in horror.

             
This was all a nightmare, she feared. It had to be.

             
At any moment, Maven would find herself within Rapier's arms and all would be forgotten.

             
“Highness!” she heard suddenly. “You live!”

             
Maven blinked numbly. Her eyes shifted to the men rushing to encircle her.

             
“We removed our weapons as you had done to follow you,” a soldier explained enthusiastically. His gratitude at the sight of her was apparent within his shining eyes.

             
“Where is Rapier?” another asked while hopefully scouring the horizon.

             
The Queen's face crumpled. Tears spilled hotly down her cheeks with abandon.

             
The men's faces fell in saddened understanding. Protectively, they encircled their Queen. Their eyes possessed a determination which voiced how desperately they wished to ensure Maven reached the other side.

             
As they slowly strode across the bridge, they paid their silent respects to the foolhardy men who had charged, swords drawn, banners raised into the fires in an attempt to battle the very world they feared.

             
The gates opened to their freedom. This supernatural sanctuary would hold them no longer. When the gates clanged closed at their backs, the fires immediately fell away.

             
Maven stared forward unseeingly. Her eyes were so filled with thick tears that their shining nature embodied glass. She lowered her glassy eyes to her right hand. Held tightly inside it was the scarlet key. She peered down at it.

             
What now
, she asked herself.
What will I do now?

             
When she regained her sense of self, she realized that it had not been her own voice which had posed the question, but rather the voices of her men who were steadily dwindling. They were a broken lot now. They were a haggard group whose numbers were scarcely the force they had once been.

             
Soon another voice came.

             
Go to the jungle where the sun sleeps.

             
Maven clutched the key to her breast. “We are leaving Logos,” she whispered.

             
The grateful cheers of her men rose high into the air. At last, they were leaving this world of madness and intangible serenities. At last, they were going home.

Chapter Nine

Change for its own sake is not progress, but chaos.

----Book of Wrath

********

             
The order had been given to return to the world of man, but the fear still remained even as they traveled within the swirling froth of merged realities: What kind of world would they find upon their return?

********

              The evening sun had begun its crimson reign over the world. It set the sky ablaze with heated intensity. Beneath its ruby light, an army of farmers toiled diligently.

             
Each man and woman with earth-stained hands lovingly worked the land. The pride found within their work manifested itself in everything they did. It was the sweat to bead their skin. It was the whispered words of encouragement voiced to their growing crops.

             
Amidst the farmers engaged within a choreographed dance with nature, a man hefted a heavy burden. He could hear the sounds of church bells tolling forlornly in the distance. The monastery had become a jewel within their land, but its presence both comforted and frightened many.

             
The rapid progression of Virtue's religion baffled him. He struggled not to dwell on it, thinking instead to the things which still made sense within his mind. Farming made sense. The land he nurtured made sense to him. He would leave the battling religions to fight amongst themselves.

             
With a sigh, he dropped a large bag from his strong shoulder. It collided with the ground in a muted thud. His eyes focused on the distance.

             
The fertile hills shivered. Their bodies were masked beneath the caress of fog.

Slowly
, the fog rolled in as an eerie lime-green thickness. It splayed outward, determined to claim the farmlands completely.

             
Over his shoulder, the farmer began to hear the sounds of others stopping their work. They too were scanning the horizon. Together, they waited in fearful trepidation.

             
Gaunt figures marched forward from the heart of the fog. They were masked by a gossamer veil of green. Their haggard lines became more vivid as the possessive clutches of the fog lost their grip.

             
The farmer took a concerned step forward as others took frightened steps backward.

             
A woman led the others at her back. She stopped just beyond the reach of the unnatural fog. Her body swayed. She tottered violently then pitched forward in a plummet toward the earth.

             
As the woman began to fall, the farmer raced forward. He knelt down beside the collapsed woman. Gently, he turned her from her stomach.

             
A mask of golden hair had draped across her face. Curiously, the farmer brushed it away curiously.

             
The woman was beautiful, but her features were thin with exhaustion. As he watched her, her features gradually changed. He couldn't say how but the faintest line here, the most subtle paling of hair there, told him that she had aged somehow. He frowned. How could a person age before another's eyes? Where had she come from?

             
Her left hand had fallen weakly across the earth. A golden ring glinted in the light as a beacon home.

             
The man's eyes widened. She was wearing a royal crest of Whispering Winds. “Get help!” he bellowed. “She's a royal!”

             
With a gasp, many farmers sprinted in the direction of their villages and in so doing, in the direction of help and hope. And yet, one soul ran for the place which had given him salvation. He ran toward the monastery where he hoped Virtue would save the mysterious noblewoman with the same grace it had saved him.

********
             

             
Furiously, the doors to the throne room burst open. Aurea lifted her eyes away from the king seeking her counsel. The flames of her gaze might have scorched Markus where he stood had he not breathlessly voiced the words to leave his lips.

             
“The summer winds have returned,” he spoke cryptically.

             
Aurea's face blanched as her heart froze inside her chest. She gripped tightly to the arms of her throne. Commanding herself to move, she pushed herself up. Her legs were weak, but she refused to fall.

             
The summer winds, she thought. Her heart thawed beneath the heat of understanding. Maven had finally returned.

             
The king looked away from Markus curiously. His gaze shifted back to the Empress. “The summer winds,” he queried. “Is there something-----” His voice was cut off by the Empress rushing past him without a second thought.

             
Markus quickly followed at Aurea's back.

             
Aurea sprinted down the hall. She was silently ushered by Galen and Olivia in the direction of garden where their fastest transports would await them.

             
“How long,” Aurea demanded as they ran.

             
“She appeared at dusk in Emerald Province,” Olivia explained. Her heart was racing in time with their spirited steps. Queen Maven was home. She had seen the Holy Lands. Truly this was a blessed day. Maven had been touched by Virtue in a way Olivia, herself, could only dream.

             
“The farmlands?” the Empress asked. She rounded a corner. Upon her approach, the doors at the end of the hallway were opened hastily by two servants with downcast heads.

             
“Yes, my Lady,” Galen nodded. He quickly followed Aurea into the lush gardens. As Aurea was aided atop her ivory owl, he anxiously informed her of what they knew.

             
“The farmers said that she emerged from some kind of unnatural fog, but no one knows where the fog came from or where it went after the soldiers arrived,” he said. “It just seemed to shrink back into itself.

             
“When the local house of Virtue was notified, they immediately took charge of the situation. They demanded that all the soldiers be treated within their infirmary.”

             
“And Maven's condition?” Aurea asked.

             
Galen shook his head. “I can't say, Empress,” he answered. “What I can tell you is that your Knights were in the area on a mission. They have since been informed of the situation and have altered course. My siblings wait for us to join them just outside Emerald territory while Angelos led a team of his best men ahead to act as protection for Queen Maven.”

             
Inwardly Aurea acknowledged Angelos' quick-thinking. Still, she was not yet ready to place her trust in him. Angelos IV had let her down before. Should this act be repeated again, it would most certainly mean his life. She was certain of that fact.

             
With an impassioned ascent, the Empress and her entourage took flight into the evening sky.

********
             

             
Row upon row of bodies groaned beneath white linen. The protective sheets had been drawn close to prevent fever's chill, but as diligent priests moved between the patients, the sheets appeared more as death shrouds.

             
The priests looked about the room with worrisome eyes.  It was hard to believe that the thin soldiers were not in fact lingering at death's door. Many of the patients were languid with waxen skin. Their eyes were dark and haunted, clouded by a faceless fear. Their very being was brittle from the exertion of their journey.

             
Angelos IV walked down the center aisle of the room. He stopped directly in its center, surveying the Pyrosian soldiers in every direction. A sickening feeling rose within his stomach. These were once good strong men. Now, they were ghosts of their former selves.

             
Beneath the priests' watchful gazes, they had witnessed time rushing to greet the soldiers. The changes varied in intensity. Why, the priest wondered.

             
Upon further investigation, weakened lips spoke of Logos. In the minds of the soldiers, they had inhabited Logos for a matter of weeks. Those weeks had rambled on into two excruciating months. Or at least that is how it had seemed. They understood that their method of time-keeping was not exact, but it was all that they had had.

             
The priests stood stunned by disbelief. Two months? This was all that it had seemed to them?

             
The actuality was that these suffering men and women had been gone a year’s time.

             
As the soldiers remained in the real world, the real world began to approach as the rushing hand of Change. The more seasoned men and women who had once only shown the slightest peppering of white within their hair now possessed a much more distinctive ivory. The youthful soldiers whose faces had not known the wears of age before their endeavor now wore the subtle lines of wisdom.