David Niemitz
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Guild Mage 71
🕑 Added 2025-01-14 14:23:47 +0000 UTCChapter 71: Savalent
“But I don’t understand why it has to always be you,” Rika insisted. “You’ve spent twenty years running all across the north. Just once, let Sohvis deal with something.”
Keri pulled the strap of his vambrace tight, making sure the enchanted piece of armor was snug and comfortable on his forearm. “It’s my duty,” he told her, reaching for the massing piece. “My father is head of the council. How can I stay here while I send someone else to do my fighting for me?”
“Your duty doesn’t seem to leave a lot of time for me or your son,” Rika continued. He wished that she’d at least had the restraint to do this in their rooms, rather than stand in the doorway of the armory, where anyone could hear. “This isn’t what I agreed to when we were joined. We were supposed to raise a child together, Keri.”
“It isn’t what I wanted, either,” he admitted. “Don’t think for a moment that I like this, Rika.” He finished with his other vambrace, and reached over to the armor rack to pull his helm off and settle it under his arm. “You think I wouldn’t rather there have been a century of peace, so that I had nothing to do but play in the snow with Rei? But I can’t control what is happening out in the world. All I can do is fight to keep you both safe, so that’s what I’m doing. I’m not going to hide behind the walls while an eruption rages, and let other men die to keep me safe.”
“That’s exactly what you’re asking me to do,” Rika shot back.
“You’ve never been a warrior, my love,” Keri said. He reached an arm out to her, but his kwenim stepped away, deliberately putting distance between them.
“You say you don’t like it,” she said, her voice hard. “But I’ve heard what the men call you now. The scourge of the north. They love you for every victory, and you love how they worship you. You love it more than you love us.”
“If I didn’t love you,” Keri argued, through gritted teeth, “I couldn’t keep doing it. I fight because I have a family to protect. And I have to go. We can talk more when I return.” He settled the helm on his head, strode over to the wall where he’d leaned his Næv’bel, and took the shaft in his grasp.
“Fine,” Rika spat, turned on her heel, and stormed away down the hall. Keri took a moment to close his eyes and count his breaths, to slow his heart. Then, he made his way out of Mountain Home and into the courtyard, where the soldiers of House Bælris waited.
“I’ve split the men as you commanded, cousin,” Sohvis said, falling into step at Keri’s side. “A third to remain behind, the rest with you to cull the rift.” He lowered his voice. “This is five years too early, at least. There shouldn’t be an eruption right now. There were no signs of it.”
“I know,” Keri said. “Which is why I need you to remain behind.”
Sohvis balked. “It’s why you need me with you,” he countered, but Keri shook his head.
“No. Someone needs to protect the elders - to hold the walls, and keep Rika and Rei safe,” Keri argued. “I can’t think of anyone alive I trust more to do that than you, Sohvis. If you’re in command here, I can fight at the rift knowing my family is safe.” He reached out and grabbed his cousin by the back of his helm, pressing their foreheads together. “Can you do that for me, cousin? Keep them safe?”
“I would never let anything happen to Rika,” Sohvis promised. “I would die first.”
“Good.” Keri released him. He strode over to Kersis, his gelding, and swung up into the saddle. The name meant ‘charger,’ or ‘runner,’ in old Vædic, and it was well deserved. There’d been a few light snows, but true winter hadn’t come yet, and that would let them reach the rift more quickly. He hoped it would be fast enough to catch the mana-beasts before they’d spilled out into the taiga.
“We know this hunt, don’t we boys?” Keri shouted, wheeling Kersis around to ride in front of the assembled warriors. Their steeds must have caught the tension in the air, for many of the horses began to paw at the stones of the courtyard. “We’ve been doing it for a thousand years. For our lives, and the lives of our fathers and grandfathers. It may have come a little early, but that’s no matter. We do what we’ve always done: we ride out to keep our families safe.” He held his spear high, where they could all see it, and allowed the slightest bit of mana to leak down his arm, up the haft, and into the blade, so that it glowed with the brightness of a summer sun.
“When night falls,” Keri shouted, and the men answered:
“We are the light!”
He let the flow of mana die, settled the butt of the spear on his stirrup, and turned Kersis for the gate. Riding in ranks, the unconquered warriors of House Bælris followed.
☙
The first wave of mana-beasts were a herd of caribou, warped into massive, steaming monstrosities. Keri’s scouts found them in the frozen forest, halfway between the lower slopes of Menis Breim and the shoals of the rift. That fight wasn’t so bad: the poor animals must have been caught up in the shoal as it expanded outward, and likely not exposed for very long. Arrows and spears made easy enough work of it, though he would have preferred a lone beast, or even two, which would not have delayed them so long.
By the time they reached the shoal, grown to half again its normal size, a low lying mist had gathered within. The entire area stank of rotten eggs. Keri held up his hand and called his warriors to a halt. “Linnea. Ilari. With me,” he called out. The two warriors he’d named off were both veterans, a man and a woman older than Keri. Most importantly, they each had a second word of power, and one that was vital for situations like this: Ve.
“Acidic, or just toxic, you think?” Linnea asked. She was dark haired and dark skinned, and had come from the eastern coast to join with one of Keri’s distant cousins. Among the sun-kissed blonde heads of those descended from Bælris, she was easy to pick out at a glance. But she’d learned the lands in her time here, and was as skilled a hunter and warrior as anyone else.
“I’d say toxic, from the smell, but I’d rather not find out,” Keri said. “Can the two of you blow it away? Send it north, if you can, but so long as it doesn’t go west, Mountain Home will be safe enough.”
“No worries,” Ilari assured him. “Leave it to us, war leader.”
Keri kept his face carefully neutral at the title, and watched the two get to work, chanting an incantation together. The council of elders hadn’t officially given him the title, but he wasn’t certain how to stop the warriors from using it anyway. Rika was wrong: he didn’t enjoy the growing esteem of the men and women who followed him because he loved glory. But he did care about those who followed him, and he wanted to return home with every one of them safe, if he could. If they believed he was someone who would lead them to victory, if that helped keep their spirits up, how could he take it from them?
The wind came from the southwest, pushing sprays of powder, fallen pine needles, and other detritus with it. It hit the low-lying bank of fog like a hammer beating hot steel, pushing the mist away from the Elden warriors, and away from Menis Breim, as well. When the attack came out of the fog, it was so sudden that both Ilari and the gelding he rode had been crushed into a red paste on the taiga floor before Keri could even register what had happened.
The bear had been brown, once, before the poisonous mana of Keremor had seeped into its bones. Now, its fur was mangy, with only patches remaining, and its skin looked burned. Its eyes were crusted with tears, and Keri could hear the pained wheezing of each enormous breath. But even if the bear might die eventually from the killing fogs of the rift, that wouldn’t be soon enough to avoid a fight.
Keri kicked Kersis into motion and wheeled the gelding around to get some distance. “Scatter!” he shouted. “Arrows, spears and words!” The warriors were well trained, and they took their horses in a dozen directions at once, giving the mammoth bear no easy target - save one.
Linnea was still chanting, and she was now the only one pushing the winds that cleared the mist. If she was aware of what had happened, she couldn’t spare the concentration to protect herself - and if she wasn’t, if she was completely caught up in the magic, the result was the same.
“Rust it,” Keri cursed. “Savelet Fleia o’Mae!” He thrust his spear toward the bear as it reared back, and he could feel the enchantments carved into the haft suck his mana in voraciously. For a moment, the blade was so bright that he couldn’t look at it, and then a beam of sunlight shot forward, taking the enormous beast in its shoulder.
The bear roared in pain, stumbling backwards. Smoke rose from its shoulder, and the stench of burned meat mixed with the rotten-egg reek of the fog that lingered. Taken together, the smells were enough to make Keri’s stomach roil, but he didn’t have time for weakness. He turned Kersis toward Linnea, leaned over as soon as he was close enough, and grabbed her reins in his left hand.
The bear came crashing down, barrelling toward the two Eld in a haze of anger and pain. But at that moment, Keri’s warriors sprang to action. A hail of arrows struck the mana-beast, and it paused to wave its arm as if at a cloud of gnats. The spells that followed were more effective.
Blasts of burning sunlight were most common: the ancestral word of House Bælris came directly from the Vædic Lord of Light, after all. But Keri’s riders were veterans, and the most experienced of them - nearly three in ten - had experience with a second word. A blast of fire took the bear in the face, and then a bolt of lightning fell from the sky to strike its flank. The roots of the pine trees rose up from the forest floor to wrap around its right leg, holding the monster in place. Together, the Eld kept it back long enough for Keri to lead Linnea’s horse out of danger.
“Hold it in place!” Keri shouted. He wheeled Kersis back around, and let his mana roar back into the blade of his spear, filling the metal until it was so hot that he could feel it nearly burning his face. The gelding was well trained, and charged forward at the bear without hesitation.
With the grace of the Eld, who’d been crafted by the old gods as dancers, entertainers, and concubines, Keri got his feet beneath him and stood on his saddle, holding the reins in his left hand and his burning spear in the right. Just before Kersis would have charged directly into the monster, Keri leaped from the saddle, thrusting the spear with both hands directly at the monster’s chest. The gelding, released from his control, swerved aside and ran past the bear.
Keri drove his spear for mana-beast’s heart, with all the force of both the horses’ charge and his own weight behind the thrust. The stink of burned flesh and hair was all around him, and the lingering poison in the air burned Keri’s eyes, making him weep as the bear staggered back under his weight.
It might have been the speed of the charge, or the pain from the super-heated enchanted metal, or perhaps the roots wrapped around its legs, but the bear fell backward, and Keri rode it to the ground. “Savalent o’Mae,” he gasped, hardly able to breathe, and sunlight erupted around him. The burst of magic burned out to every side, consuming the bear, the pine needles and brush of the forest floor, even the poison in the air in a moment of raw ignition. Keri squeezed his eyes closed and held his breath, so that he didn’t burn his own lungs with the heat. After only an instant, he cut off the flow of mana, and staggered back, falling off the cooked corpse of the bear.
He didn’t risk breathing until he felt the arms of his men around him, and even when he opened his eyes, he could hardly see. Keri found that, as the cold air of the taiga swept back in, his sweat soaked body shivered with cold.
“You saved my life,” Linnea said. Good. She was alive.
“Here, drink this,” one of the men, Olavi, said. He offered Keri an enchanted flask of caribou broth, kept warm all along their journey by magic. Keri gulped it down, and felt the rush of mana hit his stomach and move through his body. Gradually, his sight returned.
“I’m not wounded,” he said, but he accepted help back to his feet.
“Your spear.” Linnea offered it to him almost reverently, and Keri took it in his hands. Another of his warriors had gotten Kersis by the reins, and brought the gelding back around. With his legs still a bit shaky, Keri accepted a hand back into the saddle.
“That may have been the worst of it,” one of the warriors remarked. Keri thought the sentiment overly hopeful, and he was proven right a moment later by a chorus of howls.
“Why’d you have to say it, Anssi,” Linnea groaned.
“Wolves we can handle,” Keri told them. They needed to always see him strong and confident, so he straightened in his saddle despite wanting nothing more than to collapse into his bed and sleep for a ten-day. “Form up, now. We can’t let a single one of these creatures past us. Nothing reaches the walls of Mountain Home!”
The hunters of House Bælris got to work without complaint, and grisly work it was, long and exhausting. After the wolves had been dealt with, Keri sent half a dozen men to make camp. They would ditch it and raise a palisade of sharpened spikes, while Keri and the rest kept fighting. By the time night came on the first day, he’d split the group into shifts, so that a third of his soldiers could rest at any given time.
They butchered white foxes whose coats had once gleamed like the snow, but were now burned and shedding like the bear had been. The foxes and the ermines all wept as they came, their eyes red and raw from the poisonous vapors that spilled out of the rift. The rabbits they let pass: they wouldn’t be a threat to the walls of Mountain Home, even grown a bit larger, and their meat would feed the town for days. The gyrfalcons and snowy owls were brought down by arrows: they all knew from past experience that an owl grown large enough will swoop down on children, if it gets the chance.
By the second day of the eruption, they were all exhausted, and every one of them had been wounded at least once. When it was their turn to rest, Keri and the others circulated the raw mana of the rift to heal themselves as best they could, but there simply wasn’t enough time to keep up before they needed to fight again.
When the third day came and went, they were practically dead on their feet. A quarter of the warriors Keri had brought down from the mountain were too badly wounded to fight any longer, and three more had been killed since Ilari and his horse had died.
Keri was just about resigned to sending a rider back to call for reinforcements when the shoals finally began receding again. It was a slow process, but by the morning of the fourth day there was no doubt: the eruption was over, and they had survived. There would be weeks of hunting the taiga ahead of them, still, to ensure nothing threatened Mountain Home, but the worst was over.
The journey back took longer than their ride down from the mountain, due to their exhaustion and the need to transport their wounded, but on the sixth day they rode back into the courtyard. Keri had been hoping that Rika would be waiting for him, and that time apart would have calmed her anger, but instead it was his father who met him when he dismounted.
“What is it?” Keri asked, feeling a sudden rush of panic at Ilmari ka Väinis’ grim face. “Did something get over the wall? Are Rika and Rei hurt?”
“Nothing like that,” his father assured him. “All the men on the wall had to do was shoot down a few rabbits, and a single owl. You did well. But we’ve had news. There were eruptions all across the north - at the Al'Fenthia, the Tomb of Celris, and more. And there was an attack on the waystone at Soltheris. A mixed force of Eld and men, and stranger things. Great bats, like during the last war. Blood magic.”
“The cult of Raktia,” Keri said.
His father nodded. “This isn’t the end, I fear. Things will only get worse from here on.”
Comments
Dave N
Correct! Old Vaedic used C, the Elden dialect uses K
ashsalt
oh, nevermind, i assume it's the c/k difference like with cel/kel?
ashsalt
tftc! wasn't her name ractia not raktia?
George R
Thanks for the chapter hope your son feels better.
Dave N
She absolutely has super strong magic... but also limitations. We'll see more and more of that as we go along.
Dave N
Thank you, fixed! We're mostly playing board games, but he's still got a fever.
Maritienna
"nothing to do but play in the first with Rei" -> first snow? "could he take it from him" -> "from them" Hope your son feels better soon.
Gopard
Thanks for the chapter!
Gopard
Ah that sucks for your son! I hope he won't get too bad of any symptoms! I had a question and a thought reading the last chapter: Shouldn't Raktia as a literal revived Goddess be super strong with her power over magic? Is she scared of another "God's War" where they were all killed once already and is therefore biding her time or is there another thing keeping her from fighting that I missed?
Dave N
Home with my son today - poor kid's tested positive for COVID. Tomorrow we'll be back to Liv, and we'll stay with her pretty much to the end of this volume.
