Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (45 page)

“Garth. Be a dear and—” she gasped as her knife
rasped against something Tyrissa couldn’t see, “check for any rock in the
wound.” She flipped the knife around and held it out.

Garth gave her a sour face, but removed a glove
and knelt next to her. Tyrissa turned away as he gingerly reach into the wound,
and returned to staring at the column of magick shining at the center of the
courtyard.

Kexal walked over with Wolef’s body and set it
down away from the rest of them. There was no use in even asking Hali to help
the fallen Shade. She only had mastery of life and it was too late for that.
Wolef wouldn’t be so lucky twice.

“I recognize that… thing,” Hali said, voice
growing a touch stronger. “Saw them before, during the Fall. Hundreds of
pillars of blue light tearing up the city like knives from the sky. This one is
much bigger.” The pillar already showed signs of taking up that role again. The
ceiling looked like it was being consumed, pieces of rock and ruined palace
stone breaking away from the roof and orbiting the pillar.

“What is it?” Tyrissa said, reaching around to
her back to assess her own injury. She winced as she touched the wound across
her back through the tear in her shirt and felt the raised ridge of enflamed
flesh. Her fingertips came away with only a little blood. The wound was slowly
repairing itself. This one would be sensitive for days and she would have to
take care. Starting tomorrow.

“It’s a portal,” Hali said. “A direct conduit of
elemental energy between our world and the Plane of Air. This one looks
unstable. Unrestrained. Perhaps because the Rift is so close.” Tyrissa turned
back to the Hithian. Garth had finished and wiped the amber blood from his hand
with a kerchief. The wound started to stitch close, strips of pink flesh
growing over the hole like vines.

Kexal had joined them, after finding a makeshift
death shroud for their fallen companion. Tyrissa tried not to think about it.
There would be time for that later. Kexal turned to his brother and said,
“Garth, that thing was supposed to shut down wind magicks, not
tear a hole
in reality
.”

Garth gave an elaborate signed response
punctuated with a helpless shrug.

“Well, it did! Now what?”

Tyrissa stood and said, “We see where it goes.”
She clicked her staff onto the magnets, gritting her teeth as the harness
tugged at the slash on her back, and started walking. They couldn’t leave now, even
as battered as they were. This whole desperate venture could be saved. Somehow.
Tyrissa let the earthen energy rumbling in her core course through every
muscle, let it calm her, steady her. She heard Kexal stand with a curse and
follow her out onto the broken tiles.

She reached the column and extended a tentative
hand at the planar portal. Close up, it was surprisingly calm, giving off only
faint, lazy breezes. Her fingertips grazed its surface and slipped through,
creating ripples as if it were a vertical pool of water. She could feel wind
currents on the other side, much stronger than what stirred the air in the
chamber. She pulled away without effort.

“I think I can go through. Follow him.”

Kexal tried to reach into the tear and was
rebuffed, a shock of thunder resounding over the howling winds of the cavern.
He clutched the offending fingers with his other hand, wincing.

“Alone?”

“Who else?” From what little she knew, this is what
a Valkwitch was supposed to do: shut down rogue elemental energy. She could
feel no compulsion driving her forward, no Pact leaning on her mind. This felt
right. Their goals were one in the same.

She forced a weak smile. “Wait as long as you
can, yeah?”

“Sure thing, kid. Give ‘em hell.”

Tyrissa took a deep breath and stepped into the
portal. Reality disintegrated around her, the ground at her feet vanishing, the
howls of the winds becoming mute. For a split second she was nowhere.

Tyrissa floated in midair for a frozen moment.
Vralin hovered nearby, just out of reach. They exchanged a look and he gave her
the barest flicker of a smile. Then she fell. Aside from a few scattered
boulders that floated impossibly in the air, there was nothing below her but an
endless blue abyss.

Either through the favor of the ten nameless gods
or simple dumb luck, Tyrissa hurtled straight at one of the islets of earth drifting
through this cerulean void. She was so heavy, her skin aflame from transmuting
the bottomless energies of the Plane of Air. An incredible font of earthen
energy flowed through her, like the core of a planet, more than she thought
possible. All of it went into hardening her skin, her muscles, turning her
bones into diamond. She struck the earth mote with a resounding crack of
thunder that would have turned buildings to rubble. Stone cratered around her, the
deep rifts running out from the impact threatened to split the boulder in two
and send her falling once again.

Drawing in a ragged breath, Tyrissa tasted a
sublime crispness on the air that made the fresh winds of the Morgwood seem
like the filthiest smog of Forge. Pure, absolutely pure air. She pushed herself
up with a groan, sending earthen stability into the stone below as an anchor
against the constant, shifting gales that tried and failed to sweep her away.
The boulder floated in a slow circuit at the base of a churning vortex of wind.
Other isles of rock drifted on the air currents, orbiting about a center where
a radiant pillar of deep blue energy pulsed at a steady heartbeat rhythm. A
continuous thin ledge of floating stone ringed the vortex in the distance. Massive
stalactites hung from the ledge along its entire length like the maw of a
creature sized beyond understanding. Tyrissa recognized its scale and shape: it
was the lip of the Hithian Crater, a hollow reflection of the real thing. Past
the ring lay nothing but an unending sky dotted with islands of solid ground,
like an infinite, waterless sea.

The column of power tapered to a brilliant point
near where the portal dropped her, above which the air twisted,
as if
being shaped by a hasty, aggressive hand. Vralin floated near the nexus of
energy, a distant, dark silhouette against unending blue. Tyrissa knew he was
still trying to complete his work, to compete the will of his elemental patron and
birth another wave of destruction carried outward on unnatural winds.

Amidst this raw tempest Tyrissa felt as steady as
a mountain. Each foot locked to the ground below her with absolute certainty.
Yet, the winds that stirred her hair and clothes made her feel light as
cottonseed, as if she could slip into the currents and fly upward to the next islet
of earth drifting impossibly above her.

Stay with what you know.

Tyrissa willed the stone below her to reshape. It
responded easily and smoothed out into a disc, almost happy to oblige. Settan’s
words from their final training sessions returned to her: ‘
In the Planes we would
be as gods
.’

The rock at her feet felt liquid and quivered for
her command. Tyrissa pointed ahead and the stone complied, reshaping into a
narrow ramp that coiled upward like a counter vortex of earth. The effort made
no noticeable difference in the weighty core of power that grinded within her.
No limits. Tyrissa checked that her staff was firmly in place on her back and
started to run up the newly created ramp. Her feet landed without doubt,
defiant of the endless fall to either side. Ahead, the ramp stretched on as she
ran. She could feel a flow of stone on the underside racing to the fore to
provide a place for its mistress to run.

Even that wasn’t enough, so she tried something
she never learned. She stopped in her tracks and pulled the stone into a pool
below her feet, then pushed it upward into an animate pedestal just wide enough
to stand on. Tyrissa shot upward like a Skyfire rocket with a tail of stone and
soon she was level with Vralin. He flew on unseen currents of wind, freed from
the bonds of the earth in this place where his power originated. Nearby, the
column of blue energy converged to a single shining nexus of elemental magick. The
air around them shivered with power.

Vralin’s skeletal figure and torn clothing
flapping in the winds made him seem all the more a ragged, dying bird of prey. The
bracer on his left arm was in ruins, but trailed a quickly fading white mist. He
drew his remaining sword and assumed a duelist’s pose that was still infused
with that subtle grace, like the wind stirring a field of tall grass. His eyes
gave her a venomous look, hateful but weary. Above all, he looked so very
tired.

“Very well. Let’s end this.” As he wheezed out
those words, he drifted upward. Tyrissa felt the winds slashing across her
skin, a remote sensation through the earth magick running through her body.
Tyrissa didn’t need to fly to follow him. The stone at her feet flowed around
her with each step, rising or falling as need be. She carried solid footing
with her, and charged forward in silence.

Vralin weaved away from her first attacks,
twisting and dancing through the air without effort. But Tyrissa could sense a
slowness to his movements, a sluggishness when reacting to her strikes. It was
the poison of his power. Without his bracer, his filter, the energies of Air
were consuming him even faster than before. He held his left arm close to his
side, broken and useless in more than one way.

They settled into a pattern: she would charge on
a surge of Shaped earth, they would exchange a few blows, all but a few parried
or blocked, and Vralin would fly away to give himself space. Each repetition
brought more signs of weakness in the Windmage, a slow dodge here, a grazing
strike from her staff there. Tyrissa realized it was only a matter of time and pressed
on like a rockslide, unstoppable.

There was no grand finale. After what felt like
hours but was no more than a few minutes, the end came not as a gale but as a
gasp. As she caught up to him once again, their weapons clashing off each
other, something gave way in the Windmage. As he drew back from another barely
blocked attack, he lost his balance in the air and fell, as if the invisible
bonds carrying him had disappeared. Vralin fell like a feather in a slow,
aimless drift. Tyrissa Shaped the stone under her feet downward, passed Vralin,
and then expanded her platform in a large, thin disc to catch him. He crashed
to the rock in a broken heap.

He didn’t recover from the fall and made no move
for his weapon that fell just out of reach to his right side. He simply lay
there, finally beaten. Tyrissa stood over him but stayed her hand, allowing her
blood to cool. She wanted to scream questions at him, all of which started with
‘why’. But in the back of her mind, she knew the answers.

I had to. I did what needed doing. I had no
choice. I made many mistakes.

What lay in front of her was a Windmage, a once
feared and mighty Pactbound, reduced to a broken and discarded tool, all used
up by an uncaring elemental master. What choices did he make and which were
made for him? How much of the murder and mayhem and betrayal were Vralin’s
doing, and which belonged to the unseen lord of the Plane of Air?

Is this what I’ve become? Judge and
executioner?

Only minutes ago all she wanted was to beat him
to death, to make his final moments as painful as possible. That rage was long
gone, replaced by pity for this husk of a man. Tyrissa replaced her staff on
her back with a magnetic click and stooped to pick up Vralin’s thin sword. She
recognized the styling of the hilt and cross guard. They were the same design
as Tsellien’s weapons, curling vines, the center hollow. Dried blood flaked off
the blade, some of it hers and some… not.

“I’m not sure if you deserve this piece of mercy,”
she said while standing over him. Vralin made no response but the feeble
wheezing of his breath. His eyes were hard but not hateful. Tyrissa thought she
saw regret there, but that might have been a lie for her own sake. “But at some
point in the past, maybe you did.” Then she drove the point through his heart
until she hit the stone below. Vralin appeared to deflate as he died, his last
breath an accepting sigh carried away on the winds.

And it was done. Vralin was dead. Tsellien’s and
countless other deaths were avenged. The long-awaited dose of justice tasted as
bitter and hollow as Hali promised. A flash of anger returned in that moment.
Tyrissa hurled Vralin’s sword off the disc of rock to fall into the depths of the
endless sky below. She now stood alone on that isle of rock at the heart of a
ceaseless vortex of pure, primal Air, the counteracting energies of Earth
rumbling through her body, begging for yet more release. She stared into the
still pulsing, still strengthening column of blue planar energy and realized
that Vralin’s plan was still in motion. Tyrissa then asked herself a simple,
terrifying question.

What now?

Above, she could see the nexus of the planar conduit,
a radiant, growing sphere, like the entire sky condensed to a volatile ball.
There was nothing here, nothing to manipulate, no reflection of the device that
created this in the real world. Her eyes settled back on Vralin’s corpse, or
what was left of it. His body was disintegrating into a fine sand that blew
away on the wind currents, a continuation of the decay that consumed him at the
end of his life. Soon the only recognizable piece of Vralin was his bracer, the
filter that kept the elemental powers from ravaging his body too quickly.

Filters
.

Shaping the isle below her into another column,
Tyrissa ascended to the nexus point, looking away from the remnants of Vralin’s
body as it tumbled into the blue abyss, a burial in the infinite skies. She
stopped when the radiant point was at chest height. An eerie calm surrounded
the growing nexus, now wider than her shoulders. Tyrissa Shaped the isle below
her into a broad, flat surface, though directly below the nexus the stone
became jagged and broken, dust and pebbles getting drawn up into the confluence
of energies and consumed in tiny white bursts of light.

Tyrissa reached out and grazed the surface of the
nexus with a single finger, hoping for the soothing touch like earlier in the
Hithian ruins. The nexus flickered. She drew back with a cry, the tip of her
finger a brilliant white silhouette. White veins ran up her finger and faded in
her palm. This wasn’t pain. Pain she understood, could overcome. This felt like
being
unmade
, like being disassembled piece by minute piece. Earth raged
within her, far beyond what she felt while confronting Vralin. Wild and primal.
She loosed the energy into the stone below her, an uncontrolled Shaping just to
get rid of it. Moments later an impact rocked the isle from below and she
sensed the mass of stone at her feet increase. Tyrissa took a step back from
the nexus, now large enough to swallow her whole. It drew in the stone below
it, leaving a perfect, circular gap, the expanding edge fringed with the white
glow of annihilation.

She scratched at her fingertip with her thumb. It
was like scratching a statue, numb but rebuilt.

Filters and Opposition.

Tyrissa tightened both hands on her staff and took
one last breath of the pristine air of this realm. Then she stepped into the
nexus.

Air ripped her apart and Earth rebuilt her. She
became the filter between the two powers, a channel of conversion, a font of
nullification. She could see her body seared white, burning like the surface of
the sun. Every fragment of her being became its own world of annihilation. A
counterbalance came as a wellspring from within, bottomless, stoic, unfeeling.
They clashed against each other in a cycle, a raging storm of forces in
opposition.

Disintegration. Reconstruction. Destruction.
Creation. The cycles repeated for an eon compressed into a second. It could
have been either, time was nothing to her. But it was not endless. The last
thing she felt was an abrupt severance, a closing of the tear between worlds,
the wound sealing up.

There was no one to bear witness when the column
of condensed air magick vanished and for a brief moment, the constant winds of
the Plane of Air ceased their flow. The vortex was gone and at its center
floated a mountain created from the dust and disparate islets of earth drifting
through the plane, drawn to this point to restore balance. It was a reflection
of the Hithian ruins, a mountain lording over desolation. The moment of
stillness passed and the winds of the Plane of Air resumed their chaotic churn,
subdued. For now. Only scattered, spinning fragments of the reflected lip of
the Hithian Crater remained. Of Tyrissa, there was no sign at all.

She awoke to another vision, but instead of a
slice of reality on the other side of the world, this was an obvious,
dream-like construction, the details on the fringes vague. Tyrissa stood in a
circular clearing among a forest of white columns. They ran off into the
distance, and no walls could be seen, only a distant argent fog. Silver tiles
covered the floor, coming together in blurred lines. Tyrissa had her staff in
hand, one end planted on the floor. Out of all this it felt the most real, an
anchor that linked her to where she truly belonged.

A rolled, yellow parchment floated ahead of her.
It was ten feet tall, as if it belonged in the library of a god. The parchment
unfurled to reveal a map of the entire world in absolute clarity and detail. It
was simply stunning to behold. Tyrissa’s mind reeled as her eyes wandered over
the coastlines and contours of the four great continents. Her focus went to the
familiar shape of Morgale at the top of the northern continent, her homeland
now locked in the smothering white and dark evergreen of winter.