Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (8 page)

Every inch of her body ached, bleed, or was
simply too weak to go on. Each breath was forced through a filter of pain, and
when she coughed, she tasted blood. Tyrissa looked back at Xivo through
agony-blurred eyes. It was trying to snap her staff in half, but the steeloak
resisted, bending but not breaking. Its smile narrowed in frustration and the
daemon tossed the weapon aside with a shrug. The smile vanished when it turned
its attention back to her.

“Aw Hell,” it said as its body morphed back into
a well-balanced, if still inhuman, shape. It sauntered over, stopping well
short of her. Extending a single finger, Xivo reached toward Tyrissa. The air
shimmered all around her and the daemon’s finger melted into a black slag that
pooled and hissed on the floor.

Xivo growled like a pack of furious hounds and
said, “Even three weeks dead the aura is still active. Troublesome.” It started
to pace around Tyrissa in a wide circle, shaking its wounded hand and muttering
to itself in an infernal language that twisted around in Tyrissa ears like a
parasite. It ignored her, debating with itself at length.

After a few minutes of respite, Tyrissa found the
strength to sit up and tried to think through the pain. Tsellien was well
preserved, as if the processes of decay and scavengers and flies were kept at
bay. She was also armored in silver chainmail and thus heavy. Tyrissa
considered dragging the body with her to the exit, but knew she didn’t have the
energy for it. Even if she could get out of the temple, at this point she was
so badly wounded and beaten that the forest would finish her off.

She looked around for other options, for anything
that would help her. The warrior’s sword and shield lay nearby, both broken.
There was the knife embedded in her back of Tsellien’s neck, an elegant thing, its
grip shaped like a cyclone, but no better than Tyrissa’s own knife and
inadequate. She rolled the corpse onto its back, doing her best to avoid
looking into the dead woman’s face. Tyrissa found a scabbard tied to Tsellien’s
waist, a short sword with a glinting silver hilt contained within. Laying a
hand upon it, she found that it was warm to the touch.

“Fine,” Xivo declared from behind her, finishing
his internal debate. Tyrissa shot a glance over her shoulder. The daemon was
funneling almost his entire body into a massive, growing hand. Its face was
stretched thin over its head, and every other limb was a narrow core of ashen
flesh. She watched, transfixed. The horror stories of the Cleanse flashed
through her mind, all the whispers of monsters and tales of twisted men and
women. This foul place was a remnant of those times and she had blundered right
into it.

The daemon, more hand than anything else, reached
into the shimmering air, pushing through unseen resistance. Layers of flesh
sloughed off the giant hand into a growing, smoking puddle. The daemon intended
to pull her out despite the annihilating aura. Tyrissa tore herself away from
the approaching fist and drew the Tsellien’s short sword. It sang a sweet, metallic
note as it came loose. She felt calm, reassured, even as an immense grip took
hold of one of her feet and a powerful, acidic heat ate through her boot and
seared her foot. She tried to twist around to strike at the daemon, but she was
yanked away from Tsellien’s body, once again lifted into the air like a
plaything. Xivo spun and threw Tyrissa along the floor towards the trio of
cleaned skulls and the shining silver gem. She cried out as she tumbled away
from the daemon, wounds screaming in fresh agony, but she kept her grip on the
sword. She rolled into the stone circle, scattering the three skulls and
smearing the white runes chalked onto the stones.

Stand up. I will take this monster down with
me.

She could finish this. She could do that much.

Tyrissa pushed herself to her hands and knees and
then stood, each motion causing her wounds to cry out. She ignored them. She
stared down the daemon, her eyes two sapphires burning in defiance. The blade
turned hot, as if she held molten silver in her hand. Xivo gave its arm a quick
shake and morphed it into a long, cruel spike. Once again, it smiled.

The daemon charged without any of its earlier
sensual grace, only brutal, inhuman speed. Tyrissa waited a single heartbeat
and swung the sword. She was too slow. The spike gored though her abdomen with
a horrifying, wet burst. She screamed. It was beyond pain. It was simply death.

She felt Xivo lift her into the air over the
center of the daemonic circle where the shining silver gem still sat. It
focused on pooling her freely flowing blood around the gem, whispering in that
same mind-warping language from the halls above. The white symbols etched onto
the floor started to glow with a fiery light.

Tyrissa couldn’t feel her legs and her arms hung
limp at her sides. Her vision was darkened and blurred, her heartbeat frantic
and weakening. But her right hand burned with fury. She still held the sword, a
beacon of stability in dreadful, bloody chaos. Somewhere, she found the
strength to lift her arm and drive the blade into the side of the daemon’s head.
It went clean through, the point bursting out the other side, shining with
radiant silver light. Xivo’s eyes widened in surprise and looked up at her.
Tyrissa gave it a weak, blood flecked smile.

The sword started to melt and merge into the
daemon’s flesh and molten rivulets of metal ran down the sides of its head.
Silver light coursed through Xivo like arteries and the daemon
flickered
.

“A poor trade, human. We’ll still have you.” Xivo
said. The daemon then dissolved into a cloud of the black ash that coated the
hallway, the floor, and the hilltop above. Tyrissa fell to the floor into the
pool of her own blood. The wetness soaking into her back felt distant, and the
sound of ragged, shallow breathing belonged to someone else. In the corner of
her vision she saw a shining light. The gem shone brightly through a coating of
blood and flecks of ash. Unthinking and unfeeling, Tyrissa inched her hand over
toward the gem and through the growing puddle of her own life seeping away.

She curled a finger around the gem and flipped it
into her palm. It was a small, fragile thing that radiated warmth and comfort.
Tyrissa wrapped her fist around it and felt the gem shatter in her feeble,
dying grip. Somehow, it seemed like the right thing to do, the completion of a task
left unfinished.

Tyrissa then closed her eyes and died.

The poets had it all wrong. No shining beacon of
godly white light greeted her. Nor was there an endless void of utter darkness.
Death, it would appear, was shades of gray. Dense, pallid mists interlaced with
veins of sparkling silver coiled around her. She drifted through them, carried
on the languid current of an invisible river toward an unseen destination. She
could still sense her body, but it was a detached feeling, empty and uncaring.
In death, her form had but a tenuous resemblance to what it was in life, a
reflection in a wind-rippled pond, its surface distorted and its depths murky.
A chill ran through her, a pure polar shock. Cold. Death was indeed cold. The
bards were correct on that account.

Inky black motes swirled in the infinite mists,
coalescing in and out of view like inverted fireflies. They watched from the
banks of this eternal river like eyes of an infinite night. They brought the
chill, frigid daggers stabbed into her from those watchful black specks. She
didn’t care, couldn’t care. Solid thoughts were elusive and memories simmered
just beyond her grasp, unreachable glimpses of a lost life. The dark motes
increased in number, a growing swarm of corruption marring the mists. Scraps of
instinct and intuition remained, both urging flight but lacking in the means
and will. Somehow, she knew something wasn’t quite right.

Tyrissa.

That word remained as a half-thought. It meant
nothing to her. It meant everything to her. She held to it like life itself as
death drained her away.

Arms of heavenly warmth embraced her. The cold
melted away, any shred of fear banished in the face of an overpowering sense of
safety, like an infant cradled in her mother’s arms. A force lifted her up and
away from the river, the mists streaking into a brightening blur as deathly
gray turned to radiant silver. When they came to a halt, the mists were a
brilliant, argent fog, peaceful in a way she never thought possible. Glorious.
Divine. A slow and scattered awareness returned to her mind, the clarity
stunning after the impenetrable haze of a dying soul. Voices spoke, the
languages unknown yet understandable. Bathed in the magnificent light of this
place, Tyrissa could only listen.

“Daughter. Latest of the North. Be welcome.” The
first voice spoke across the gulfs of time, ancient and distant. It came as the
crash of waves upon the rock-strewn coast of an abandoned land. “You bear
another. Strange. We share in their name. We share their Fields. Not their
function. What soul is this?”

“Honored First, I submit this one as my heir.
Grant her the Essence of our line as my successor.” Tyrissa knew that one. She
spoke in an airy, buzzing language. It was Tsellien, sounding even more
ethereal than before.

The reply came as the crackling of a wildfire as
it guttered out on a charred plain. “Choice belongs to the living. This time,
we shall sleep. No Succession. Rebirth.”

“We don’t have time for that.” From reverence to
defiance in a blink.

A rockslide answered: “Time. Time is another
concern of the living. Release yourself from it. Your role in their world is
complete, the burden no longer yours. Rest, daughter. Watch. Sleep. It is our
reward.”

“Watching the world burn is no reward.”
Tsellien’s voice was gradually losing its vitality, becoming as hollow and
detached as the First. “The East is fractured and tainted by her own hand. The
West is but a child, unready and vulnerable. We’re nearly broken when we must
be stronger than ever. The North cannot sleep. Not now.”

The waves returned, speaking in the steady rhythm
of the tides. “The South. She has stood alone in the past. She can again.”

“They haven’t the
time
,” Tsellien pleaded
with the unseen void of eternity. “The Elements sense their advantage. They
roil in fury against thinning barriers, slipping though uncountable weak
points, man-made or not. Soon, a great storm will boil through the world.”

A distant avalanche’s roar: “And you would cast
this one adrift into that storm? Returning this one would leave her alone and
lost in a life of strife. She’d be flawed and weak and ignorant. Her earthly
time, and yours, is at an end. We wait for Rebirth.”

“And while we wait the world will unknowingly
depend on a single set of shoulders,” Tsellien said, her voice losing its
passion, its humanity. “I’d rather balance the world along an axis than a mere
point. Yes, this one will be flawed but we all are. That’s the weakness
and
strength of our line.”

As Tsellien made her case, Tyrissa felt… nothing.
They spoke of her yet she regarded the conversation as about someone else.
She
was but an observer, and a distracted one at that. The flecks of shadow began
to reappear in the silver fog, vile imperfections that floated in the calming
clouds and ate away at the warmth of this place. She wanted to cry out a
warning, but lacked the means. She knew they were here for her, here to claim
their prize.

‘
We’ll still have you
,’ said the memory of
a corrupt chorus.

The wind sighed across a mountain valley,
stirring the boughs of an expanse of needled treetops, “Proceed, daughter.”
With that it retreated into the void, blowing away like sand scratching over
the cracked stonework of a dead empire, leaving only a sudden emptiness.

Tyrissa felt the mists draw away, but the motes of
shadow remained, multiplying, threatening in their profane presence. Tsellien
knelt at her side, the woman’s face an indistinct artist’s sketch, her body
wrapped in gently billowing sashes of regal purple and silver. Pristine white
feathered wings spread from her back, an encompassing shroud that blocked none
of the omnipresent light. Tyrissa felt a weight press onto her chest, through
her heart. Tsellien’s eyes flared into two pools of molten silver, narrowed in
concentration. Filigree flows of divine energy ran between them. Connecting.
Binding.

“Few get second chances, child of Morgale. If you
live you will live for our cause alone.” Her voice now held an angelic timbre
as timeless as the First’s. A surging, unreal heat spread through Tyrissa’s
body. She felt solid again, rebuilt. Still, those inky motes of shadow pressed
in, some extending clawing fingers that wormed through her being, as cold as
death.

“A life of service or the oblivion of death. Do
you accept?” Tsellien’s voice became as the mists around them, filth-specked
and distorted. The corruption’s strength grew close to overpowering the purity
of this place, the mists now more black than silver.

“Yes,” Tyrissa said, the word a spectral whisper
carrying the weight of the universe.

“Prove yourself worthy of this legacy, daughter.”

Tsellien placed a hand on Tyrissa forehead and
pushed her down and away in a burst of blinding silver light. As she fell
through the mists, a celestial bundle of energy burned like a young star in her
heart. On came the darkness from below, that missing embrace of oblivion. It
dared not touch her now, its chill held at bay by the heat of raw, radiant
power that blazed within her.

Warmth. For a stunning slice of eternity all
Tyrissa felt was warmth. The spectral conversation between Tsellien and the
First dissolved away like the details of a dream, until all that remained was
the wash of silver light and their final words: Prove Yourself Worthy.

Tyrissa awoke to the warmth of the afternoon sun
shining upon her face through one of the rifts in the ceiling of the temple.
Her eyes fluttered open, settling into a squint against the light. Her heart
held a calm beat, and her first breath drew in the sweetest air she’d ever
tasted, even if it was thick with the scent of blood.

Blood. It was everywhere and she lay at the
center of a congealed pool. Tyrissa could feel it soaked through the back of
her tattered clothes, stains coating her arms and face, dried flecks falling
away when she moved. Her stomach heaved in revulsion as she realized this was
all her blood. Then the memories of what transpired flooded back into her mind,
every agonizing detail. Tyrissa sat up with a startled cry accompanied by the
vile sound of peeling away from the sticky floor. Her hands went to her abdomen
where the daemon’s fatal, savage blow landed and found only clean skin ringed
by her torn shirt. All of the lesser, countless cuts from the fight were also
gone. She checked her left side for the long, jagged scar from a nasty fall years
ago, brushing away caked-on blood. Nothing. Her arm was clear of the weeks old
scars from the wurm as well.

She was alive, reborn, rebuilt. Her mind twisted
in rejection, racing for a denial. It was a dream. This was the afterlife. This
is a daemon’s final trick.

No.
I’m alive. Even if I smell of
nothing but death.

The thought was horrifying and exhilarating in
equal measure.

Tyrissa pulled her legs, stiff and caked with
blood, free of the pool. She crawled a few paces away, pushing aside the ring
of stones. Where she once lay there was now an outline in the blood pool. Out
of the sunlight and the disorientation fading, she noticed that not all was
well. Her left foot still burned with a persistent, acidic heat where the
daemon grabbed her. She yanked off the half melted and useless remnants of her
boot, the sole hanging on by frayed strips of once-fine Morg leatherwork. Pain
flashed through her like lightning and her scream echoing through the empty
cathedral was its thunder. Charred skin and bead sized boils coated her foot
and ankle. Her toes were unaffected and she could wiggle them, receiving five
lashes of pain for the effort. It had to be a lingering corruption, a flaw in
otherwise divine mercy.

Tyrissa took in her surroundings while waiting for
the pain in her foot to subside back to the dull burning. The chamber was
unchanged and yet somehow less sinister. Wind whistled across the cracked
ceiling as rich afternoon sunlight angled down onto the black floor tiles.
Judging by the light she had been out for a few hours. Her staff, still
thankfully in once piece, lay against one wall. Her pack was near the entryway,
its contents spilled out on the floor. She could recall images of every second
of the one-sided fight, yet couldn’t remember removing the bag or the daemon
cutting it away.

She steeled herself and looked over at Tsellien’s
body. A cloud of flies swarmed about the corpse, the natural processes of decay
rushing in to reassert their sway. Tyrissa crawled over to her unexpected
savior, eyes tearing from the waves of pain that coursed out of her foot.

Tsellien’s wore a death mask of resignation, of
utter calm. With a bowed head, Tyrissa gave her a short, silent wake, the best
she could do here. The buzzing cloud of flies sang the funeral dirge.

“I’m sorry,” Tyrissa said to the dead woman, as
she pulled off Tsellien’s left boot and looked for anything else worth
scavenging. She would need to cover her foot and eventually walk on it to get
home. No one knew where she was. She would be rescued by no hands but her own
and found it easier to think of it not as scavenging but as a final set of
gifts, a critical, if vague difference.

Tyrissa crawled over to a nearby discarded cloak.
The material was a fabric she didn’t recognize: light, soft and colored a
simple gray with bright silver threads lining the edges in delicate, curling
patterns. At the neck was a metal brooch bearing an emblem of a shield with
four quadrants. The shield was winged with ten curving feathers, five on a
side. Stamped below the emblem were a pair of runic letters in a language just
as foreign as the lettering that adorned this temple, though these were
graceful rather than sinister. She saw now that the same winged shield emblem
adorned pieces of Tsellien’s armor, discreetly placed, hidden in plain sight.
Tyrissa held the clasp tight in her hand and then threw the cloak over her
shoulders.

She recovered her staff and bag next, fighting
through the flares from her foot that were becoming a constant, but ignorable,
presence as she crawled across the channels of sunlight and shadow on the
cathedral floor. Gritting her teeth, Tyrissa poured part of the contents of her
water skin over her foot. Flecks of filth, residue of the daemon’s touch,
washed away. She folded over a length of the leather strap of her bag and bit
down on it, took the bandages from the bag and wrapped them around her foot.
Tyrissa pulled the bandages tight and birthed a new supernova of pain,
screaming through clenched teeth. She spat out the leather with a string of
profanity, drank the rest of the warm water from the skin and lay back, waiting
for her breath and heart to slow. Pulling on Tsellien’s boot was mild by
comparison.

After repacking her now woefully insufficient
supplies, Tyrissa struggled to her feet, leaning heavily on her staff as a
crutch. Step by pained step she retraced her path out of the damned, unhallowed
grounds of the temple. She kept her eyes down, focused on the stairs before
her. This time the temple was silent, no aural tricks, no grip of hot darkness.
There was only the black stone, quiet and eternally uncaring, without menace.
She walked through the patches of black ash on the floor without fear, knowing
she trod upon the remains of daemons slain by Tsellien and her fallen allies.

Outside, the air felt
right
again. Birds
and insects flew above the blackened circle and midnight spire, where before
the air was empty. The spire itself no longer seemed to devour the light, as if
accepting its place in the natural order. Instead of relief, Tyrissa only felt
a steadily building hatred for the spire, its unearthed temple, and for
herself. Her luck today was only exceeded by her stupidity, her ignorant
assumption she was invincible.

The descent to the valley was the worst: an
extended blur of gingerly placed hand and foot holds. Tyrissa lost track of how
many times she slipped or lost her grip on the way down, numb to the little
scraps and cuts from the rocky ground. They were inconsequential. She’s had
worse now. For the rest of her days she will always have had worse.

At the base of the hillside she found a narrow
stream flowing into the valley, the water fed by the still melting snows from
the Norspine peaks. She rested here, refilling the water skin and trying her
best to rinse some of the blood out of her clothes, hair, and skin. Her motions
were automatic, unthinking. The sun dipped toward the heights of the Norspine
Mountains in its extended summer sunset. With precious few hours of light left,
Tyrissa stood, wincing, and started the slow march back down the rock-strewn
valley.

Will never make it home before dark. Must find
shelter. Must get away from here.

Tyrissa’s mind looped through those three
thoughts. This morning she was a queen of these woods, striding through the
trees fearless and untouchable. Now, hobbled and stunned, she was prey,
carrion. She even smelled the part.

Tyrissa found what she sought after hours of
scant, agonizing progress, just as the sun began to pass behind the peaks at
her back. At the center of the valley, not far from where she descended this
morning, were the gutted ruins of a cluster of homes. Abandoned during the
Cleanse like every other sign of human hands in the Morgwood, the ruin was
little more than a ring of six overgrown foundations around a crumbling stone
longhouse. Tyrissa didn’t know who lived here before leaving it to ruin, but
assumed it was the home of an extended family, a common practice in the old
days. Fields clear of boulders and dotted by younger trees surrounded the
homestead: former farmland in the process of being reclaimed.

Relived, Tyrissa limped to the empty doorway of
the central building. A strong oaken door, its red paint chipped and faded by
two decades of nature’s cycles lay splintered against the opposite wall, as if
violently blasted through. It was the only hint of the fate of this family’s
little village, everything else burned or washed away by the march of time. The
longhouse’s roof had collapsed long ago, filling the interior with rubble of
rotted wood and splintered tiles, but it would be enough shelter for the night.
Tonight was the peak of the aurora’s hazel phase, and the darkness would be
weakened.

Through the lengthened twilight of the mountain’s
shadow Tyrissa worked at clearing a space in one corner of the longhouse,
enough to lie down near a small fire. The remnants of the ceiling beams, rotted
as they were, would provide plenty of fuel. As she worked, she could feel a
sickness building in her, seeming to radiate up from her scarred and blackened
foot.

As true night descended, Tyrissa had a
respectable campfire crackling along one of the remaining walls and she sat
nearby in a corner, huddled within Tsellien’s cloak. Every few minutes she
would toss still green lengths of pine needles onto the fire, creating a pungent
smoke that she hoped would hide the lingering scent of blood. Though the night
felt like it would be warm and the campfire heated her makeshift shelter,
Tyrissa hugged her knees to her chest and shivered from illness. So much for
wholly miraculous healing.

Her mind raced, blinking through hundreds of
ideas and memories and promises, never lingering on one for more than a few
seconds in a maddening babble of conscious and subconscious thoughts, the chaos
and delirium of fever. Sleep came in desperate fits that were broken by a flare
of pain from her foot, or worse, the distant howl of wolves. Once, she
cherished that sound, wild and free. Tonight it only brought a primal terror.

In clearer stretches of thought, Tyrissa tried to
remember more details of that
other
place. Her glimpse of the afterlife
became even more clouded and indistinct, a dream of a dream. She stared into
the weakening flames of the campfire and tried to concentrate, but the clearest
thing she could remember was the promise, the command: Prove Yourself Worthy.
She could
feel
it around her heart and mind, a loose binding that could
grow tighter as one struggled against it. Just like the stories. That was it.
The conclusion shone down, a ray of summer sunlight in the darkest midwinter
night.

I agreed to a Pact.

The thought chilled her more deeply than the
fever racking her body or the cool night air that crept though the fading heat
of her dying campfire. She was Pactbound, a tool of elemental forces beyond the
physical world, the subject of legends and horror stories, the instigators and
targets of the Cleanse. Hero and Monster.

Do I even have a choice over which I’ll be?

She could have refused and remained among the
dead. Yet somehow, Tyrissa did not think she even considered it, was not capable
of considering it. Her memory of the exchange was now little more than an
impression, a vanishing glimpse. She tried to internalize the idea, a mix of
resignation and acceptance. There was no going back. So far as she knew, once
you were bound by an Elemental Pact you were bound for life.

Tyrissa raised her eyes to the night sky, at the
canopy of stars shining behind the aurora’s coruscating ribbons of hazel light.

“I’ll do as you ask,” she whispered.

A reply came in the form of Tyrissa’s skin breaking
into a cold sweat, her fever fading. The pain in her foot dropped to a dull
ache. A serene feeling washed over her as she was embraced by the arms of
sleep.