The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) (7 page)

“There’s no other option,” Dalah said. “I wouldn’t do it this way if there
was
another option.”

“What do you need us to do?” Rosalee asked, cutting Grace off as she took another breath to argue.

Grace scowled at the redhead.

“It would be best if you two stand outside while I do this, and don’t interrupt.” Grace and Rosalee took this as their dismissal and stepped out the door.

Dalah walked the floor several more times, gazing at the stones and whispering to them. Occasionally she would bend down and touch one, and it would shift slightly. If there was any struggle in touching her wyrd she was not showing it — however, if she were trying to use it and the stones were barely moving then there would be a problem.

Dalah stopped suddenly and flung her arms wide, and in response several stones of varying sizes were tossed into the air and scattered around the ground, forming what appeared to be the perimeter of the hole. They soared through the air and settled gently into their spots. Occasionally they were slightly off the mark, but Dalah walked around again, either nudging them with her shoe or pointing to where they were supposed to be, and like obedient children the stones would roll, teeter, or hop into the spot she indicated. There was one sluggish one that she had to nudge several times before a curse and a stern point prodded it into reluctant movement.

Dalah stopped then. She spread her arms out, her hands splayed open, and closed her eyes. Another look of extreme concentration came to her face and they could see her struggling. Before long there was a sound like tumbling rocks as they all clanked together, and finally a grinding noise as the separate stones solidified into one large slab.

Dalah turned her back to them then and turned her hands over. As if she were a puppeteer and the stone her marionette, she raised her hands, and the slab obeyed. Slowly it rocked back and forth, though with the wyrd she had just worked they all stayed successfully bound together. It took effort, there was no doubting that, and if they were closer they would have seen the sweat as it beaded up on Dalah’s face; if she had not turned from them they would have seen the look of pain and will struggling on her face.

But they did see her lemniscate glow with wyrd, not blue or silver as was normal, not even the occasional green or yellow for one stronger in air or earth wyrd, but instead it glowed red — malicious, Chaotic red, which writhed on her skin as if it were the very flames of some bloody fire.

Grace made to gasp, but Rosalee’s hand on her mouth stifled the noise as they both watched Dalah in fear and worry. Rosalee’s hand on her arm stayed Grace’s movements towards their friend. They both knew there was nothing they could do now; this was the only way to get into the Well of Wyrding, but their friend was being corrupted by touching her wyrd, while attempting to get into the very well that corrupted her.

The stones of the perimeter finally rose to their place in the roof and fused in with another grinding sound of rock on rock. The lines that normally held them apart glowed softly, and when the light vanished there was not even a fissure.

Dalah smoothed her blonde hair back into its bun and continued on.

Grace had to turn away, for there was a look coming over Dalah, a pallor that meant no good at all. Dalah was sweating profusely and her hair looked lank and dull. Where she once shone with life, Dalah now looked used up, tired, near catatonia. The wyrd was taking hold of her, and Grace begged the Goddess to keep Dalah going. Grace could not help but think they were lost if Dalah died before they went into the well and fixed the problem, and she cursed herself even as she thought it.

Finally the tears that had been building up spilled out of her eyes, and Grace had to leave the doorway, leave the image of Dalah’s incredibly fatigued body and angry red lemniscate behind to cry out of earshot.

And so Grace and Rosalee passed most of the time sitting, staring out a floor-to-ceiling window onto the fog-clotted forest, beyond the meticulously manicured lawns with their various trees and bushes now becoming skeletal with the approach of autumn.

When Dalah found them later, they were in the kitchen preparing dinner, which consisted largely of leftover stew. Grace had long since stopped weeping, busying herself with the meal and her tankard of ale. A silence had fallen between the two of them as Rosalee and Grace both came to grips with something they knew before they had started their reconstruction.

Most likely not all of them were going to make it out of the Well of Wyrding, and if they did they would be forever changed.

They put on a good front, though, talking about what had happened that day, though Rose and Grace did not mention seeing Dalah’s lemniscate glowing red. Dalah probably had felt it, and there was no point in dwelling on it and upsetting everyone further.

Dalah looked tired, but nothing more than that. The pallor and the sickness that had plagued her within the temple room was gone, though she remained incredibly weary. Grace figured that could be owed to the amount of wyrd she had just worked.

“So what’s this?” Rosalee asked as she picked up the parchment with the nymphs’ names on it, which Grace had removed from her pocket the night before. They had just finished cleaning up and were now all nursing various drinks before turning in to sleep, though Dalah looked as though she were very nearly sleeping in the chair at the table, her head lolling over her ale.

“Eh, that is just a collection of names. We stumbled upon five dead nymphs just outside of Betikhan Valley, right after coming out of the Mountains of Nependier, and there they were laying on a rock, their tongues and eyes removed.”

“The eyes of a nymph can see the truth of a person, can see their intent, their secrets and wyrd. The eyes would have been removed symbolically, I imagine, as an indication that they would never again see truth. Their tongues, now that’s a little trickier. A nymph can repeat something even after they are dead, as long as what they saw before death was psychic in nature. I imagine they saw the person that killed them, and their tongues were removed so that they would not tell.”

Rosalee was nodding at Dalah’s words. Grace had seen a nymph prophesize after death, and the memory of it made her shiver.

“Well, we know who killed them,” Grace argued.

“Well then, there must have been something else about them that Porillon didn’t want known. She wouldn’t have stalled just to kill some poor nymphs.” Dalah said, rolling her hand as if to say “continue.”

“She killed all those sprites,” Rosalee said. “But I think that was more reaction to her wyrd than anything else. That would explain why the fauns and nymphs were not happy to see me,” Rosalee mused.

“Continue, Grace,” Dalah said.

“Anyway,” Grace said. “Just before their funeral Orilyn told me there was a message to be gleaned from what was next said from the nymph and faun leading the ceremony. The only things they said were their ages and their names.”

“There’s a pattern here,” Rosalee said to herself, or to the invisible person perched on her shoulder, it was hard to tell. She gathered the parchment to herself then began studying it, saying random things to her shoulder, and then listening to her other shoulder. Grace wasn’t sure if her friend was completely insane, or if she was just able to commune better with the ether because of all her time spent out of her body. It would make sense that she had contact with guides and beings that the others could not see.

“I wish you more luck than I had,” Grace said.

“Well, I think it’s time that I head to bed,” Dalah said, and afraid that she would not make it there safely, or worried of what she saw Dalah go through earlier, Grace and Rosalee hurriedly placed their mugs in the sink and followed her.

The next day, while mopping the floor free of the scorch marks from wyrded fire, Rosalee, Grace, and Dalah all saw the telltale sign of the Well of Wyrding: a carving on the floor, of a great tree supported by a stone well. The image was wreathed by runes that they knew had to be read in order to gain access.

Though it was thought that reading the runes merely meant translating them, that was the farthest from the truth, for the runes had to be read by rote, and the pattern in which they had to be chanted was complex at best.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, when the markings of fire had been cleaned away the runes shone with an angry red light. The Well of Wyrding was awake, and it was not happy.

C
ianna had felt the corruption of the well differently than any other living person in the Great Realms. Huddled in her bedroll under the clear stars, she listened to the wails of the dead and dying. She’d never realized that the power of the well was more linked with a necromancer than most, for while all wyrders and most non-wyrders could feel the corruption, Cianna could hear it as well. And the dead were more like wounded children than other people would imagine. They were confused to begin with, not understanding what was going on, stranded in the realms but not able to interact with people. Add the corruption to that, eating away at their ether, and it magnified tenfold.

Like the tree and its roots, a necromancer was tied to the lives of men: their birthing, their passing, and the problems that persisted after their death. While their transcribed fates on the Evyndelle went cold once they died, spirits were still tied to them in a way the living were not. While the living were making their way through their destinies, their progress being forged on the roots, the dead lived on in the roots, and in the memories tied to them. When a person died, they still retained the cognition they had in the living world, but they were no longer of it. Instead they joined with the Goddess in the Ever After, ventured past the Black Gates into the Otherworld, or were trapped in the living plane with unfinished business, or an unwillingness to give up on their old lives and pass on. What they were after they died was largely determined by how they were remembered on the roots.

For the ones unable to cross over, the roots of the Evyndelle in a sense became their physical body, the thing that tethered them to the living world. And now the roots were being poisoned.

The dead and dying had a power that the living didn’t. This power was simple: they could see other happenings around them, they could see what was happening with wyrd, what was happening in the Well of Wyrding, and what was about to befall the race of man. They also felt the pain of the well. Most people thought that once one was dead they passed from pain and grief, and while this was true in most circumstances, the corruption of the Well of Wyrding was a different story all together.

Cianna couldn’t explain it, but she felt it all the same. The dead made sure that she was aware of what was happening, what they were feeling, and the anger they had at those still living for doing such a thing to them.

The worst thing was that Cianna was starting to feel for them. There was an unexplainable anger taking her over at times, thinking of humans and how they could do such a thing to these spirits. When Cianna noticed she was feeling such things, she would push the thoughts away.

She wished that there was a way to stop the pain she was feeling, the pain every wythe was flinging at her. Hundreds, possibly thousands of souls flocked to her, bemoaning their crumbling fates, their poisoned pasts.

She trembled, she shook, and sometimes she retched. The dying were not aware of what they were doing to her, for they could only feel the fear of going into an Ever After where they would endlessly feel their past fate — which was even now becoming plagued, convoluted with anger and chaos.

While most wyrders had to worry about channeling the poisoned wyrd when they cast, Cianna had to worry about the poisoned dead forcing their chaos through her. She couldn’t stop them: she didn’t have the training or the skill to stop the dead from coming to her, from haunting her dreams, from plaguing her waking life.

Sometime along the way her spirit wolf, Alt, had died. At least that was what Cianna assumed. She had watched the transition, watched as he weakened and weakened. Finally he had stopped appearing all together. She could no longer feel him, and she was afraid, for where did a soul go, what happened to it, once it passed out its usefulness? Was she to believe that he had gone to a place that she couldn’t reach into? And where might such a place be? A necromancer was able to feel all the dead, no matter where they were.

He had whined a lot in those last days, in pain. She couldn’t understand it, for the Well of Wyrding had to do with the race of man and not animals. Were spirits just an extension of wyrd?