David Niemitz
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Guild Mage 70
🕑 Added 2025-01-13 20:46:58 +0000 UTCIf the western mountains had ever had names, Wren didn’t know them. The goddess hadn’t bothered to share, though she clearly had a destination in mind. These peaks were both more steep and more rugged than those near the coast, thrusting up into the clouds like blades. All down the summit and upper slope, the Red Shield camp spread.
Despite the difficulty of the journey through the jungle, and then skirting the edges of the badlands, the group of worshippers had grown. For every original Red Shield who fell to the bite of a venomous serpent, sickness brought by the sting of mosquitos, or bad water, two new arrivals had taken their place. They came from the east, across the ocean: some from Lucania, others from Lendh ka Dakruim, and there were even Eld from the north.
It was disorienting. Wren stalked through the camp, frowning at the mix of dialects and languages, at the variety of clothing. Everything had changed, since the day her father and the bloodletters had used the blood from a stolen idol.
“Wren!” She paused, turning at the sound of her cousin’s voice. Calm Waters and her husband had been among the most ardent supporters of the resurrected goddess, and also among the first blessed with fertility by Ractia’s power. Even now, Wren’s niece, Blossom, trailed along behind her mother. The girl was only five years old, and didn’t even remember the tribe’s traditional hunting grounds to the east.
“Cousin,” Wren greeted Calm Waters, with a smile. She caught up Blossom, swung the girl around twice, and then set the girl on her hip. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in weeks. You’ve been well, I hope?”
“Well enough,” Calm Waters said. “May I speak to you a moment?” She nodded her head to the trees that clung to the high slopes, away from the encampment.
“Always,” Wren said, and led the way, carrying her niece. In all honesty, it was a comfort to get away from the bustle of so many people in one place. It almost reminded her of Calder’s Landing, now, or even a town like Whitehill.
“We’re leaving,” Wren’s cousin said, in a hushed voice. “And I think you should come with us.”
“Leaving?” Wren felt her stomach drop. “What do you mean?”
“Before they call the warriors together,” Calm Waters explained. “Before they notice that Soaring Eagle is missing. This isn’t what we thought it would be, Wren, and I think its time you admitted that.”
“Of course it is,” Wren argued. “We have our goddess back, and she’s blessed us. She’s blessed you.” Her father’s words, coming out of her mouth. She’d heard them often enough over the past years that they came now without even thinking. Blossom began to wiggle, so Wren set the girl down and let her scamper off after a particularly bright mountain flower. She didn’t even know the names of all the plants here, they were so far from home.
“We wanted a child,” Calm Waters said. “Not a war.”
“It won’t be a war,” Wren insisted. “It’s a rescue. There are so many believers still trapped over the ocean, who can’t get passage on a ship. You’ve heard the stories of those who came from the north, how the Eld are hunting them.”
“It’s horrible,” Calm Waters agreed. “But I’ve also heard them talk about the sort of sacrifices they used to make. There’s a difference between animals and people, Wren. Have you even looked at your father lately? He’s not the same man anymore.”
Red eyes, shining in the dark. Wren shook the image away. “He’s just so busy, you don’t understand how much is on his mind. He’s the right hand of the goddess, and that’s a lot of responsibility. When we’ve rescued our brothers and sisters, he’ll be able to relax again.”
Calm Waters looked down at the ground, sighed, and then raised her head to meet Wren’s eyes without flinching. “If you aren’t ready to see it yet, I understand. I wasn’t either, for a long time. I was too grateful to have Blossom. In some ways, I still am. But we brought her back to save our tribe, Wren, not to throw us into battle. We’re leaving - going back to the old hunting grounds.”
“That’s a very long journey to take alone,” Wren said, looking over to where her niece played in the dirt.
“My husband is a good hunter,” Calm Waters said. “He’ll get us enough blood to fly most of the way. It’s how we were meant to travel, anyway, without all these other people slowing us down.”
“Blossom won’t be able to fly that far,” Wren argued.
“So we’ll rest often.” Her cousin shrugged. “She’s a strong girl. But it’s better than staying here, Wren, and we aren’t the only ones who think so. Have you noticed that Falcon and Laughing Brook are gone?”
“I thought they’d just been out hunting,” Wren admitted. The two brothers had often ranged far and wide to return with enough game to feed the encampment.
“This isn’t the Red Shield tribe any longer,” Calm Waters said. “When you understand that, we’ll be waiting for you to come back to us.” She reached out and embraced Wren for a long moment, then released her and stepped back. “Come along, Blossom.”
Wren watched the two of them walk away, and the wild thought of running after them filled her mind for longer than it should have. She was wanted below. Finally, she turned her steps back up the mountain slope, and toward the gate.
It had taken weeks of searching to find, hidden beneath a thousand years of vines and fallen scree. The rocks had been shovelled off to the side, the growth hacked away, and now the great metal doors in the mountain stood revealed again. The Eld in the encampment said that the doors stood within the shoal of the rift beneath their feet, but for herself, Wren could not feel anything until she descended to where the mana was most dense, and became a heaviness in the air. Even for those who could not use mana, it eventually became impossible to ignore.
The doors opened soundlessly at Wren’s coming, splitting down the middle. In the beginning, they had only moved for the goddess herself; but Ractia had altered the magic so that her most trusted subordinates were able to come and go, as well.
Wren preferred to fly down the shaft on her own wings, but with a fight coming she couldn’t spare the blood. Instead, she stepped out into the empty space just past the gates. There was always a heartstopping moment of fear before the disc formed: a circular floor of pure blue mana, pulsing with veins of gold, that filled the circular shaft and supported Wren’s weight. It waited, and when no one else joined her, dropped suddenly out from beneath her feet.
The lurch and sudden feeling of falling always made Wren stiffen, because the descent wasn’t under her own power. The mana-disc moved quickly, at least, down into the darkness. Ractia said that there wasn’t enough mana to spare on lighting the shaft, or on anything else that was not essential - especially with the assault imminent. The halls beneath the mountain, at least, were lit by small bulbs of mana-stone that glowed with the ambient magic they’d absorbed from the rift, and Wren was easily able to find her way.
Nighthawk Wind Dancer, along with the goddesses’ other advisors, waited in the very heart of the mountain, in the room of glass. Ractia had appointed one person to her council from each of the groups of her worshippers. From the Eld, a sharp man named Calevis, who claimed to be descended from the Lady of Wyrms. His eyes glittered like green jewels, and they followed Wren with a focus she found uncomfortable as she crossed the room.
From Lendh ka Dakruim, a man named Aariv, the oldest of them, with a wrinkled face and long gray hair. Wren had watched him use his magic to light the ceremonial fires in the goddesses’ honor, at more than one sacrifice. She wondered whether Aariv would be burning their enemies today.
Manfred, a mercenary from Lucania, represented the humans among the faithful. He’s been open about the fact that he came to the goddess for magic, and Wren knew that Ractia had given it to him. He was the only one to wear armor, and he carried a warhammer at his belt, with a small head meant for dealing with steel plate. His eyes had been brown when he’d arrived, but now they glistened as red as Nighthawk’s.
The last of the advisors couldn’t properly be said to be living at all. Karis looked like nothing so much as a living suit of antique armor, from the tips of his sabatons all the way up to the shadows beneath his helm. Wren thought of the warrior as a ‘he,’ but in truth she might as well have used the word ‘it.’ Constructed by Antris, the Vædic Lord of Machines, Karis had been slumbering beneath the mountain when they’d arrived. The goddess had been particularly happy to find him, and very pleased when she was able to wake him. For Karis, it was like a thousand years had simply gone by while he was sleeping.
It did not escape Wren’s attention that not a single one of Ractia’s advisors was a woman. The goddess’ tastes ran to the muscular and fit. Wren had to restrain herself from grimacing at the memory of the Great Mother’s hands caressing her father’s bare chest during more than one council meeting.
“The warriors are gathered,” Wren’s father told her, by way of greeting. His voice rumbled through the room like an avalanche. “Manfred will lead the assault, and you will accompany him.”
“Do we have our promised distraction?” Wren asked. Despite what she’d said to her cousin, there was a lot that could go wrong with this plan, as she’d argued time and again.
“Have faith,” the goddess said, from her place in front of the great curved panes of glass that filled an entire half of the room. Lights in a dozen colors danced across the glass, moving with every graceful sweep of Ractia’s hands. Vædic sigils crawled along in blocks that changed too rapidly for Wren to even attempt to read.
“What are you going to do?” Wren pressed. She was often the only one who questioned the goddess about her plans, but she wasn’t willing to risk her life through ignorance.
Ractia did not turn, but the movement of her hands paused briefly. “The ring is incomplete, since Tamiris used parts of it to bombard us, but it still collects enough power for our needs. I am connecting the waystone here to the one at Soltheris, but calling down so much mana will cause overloads all throughout the network. What you call eruptions,” the Lady of Blood explained, before Wren could ask.
“Which rifts are going to erupt?” Wren asked, with a frown.
“Half a dozen, perhaps a few more,” the goddess told her with a careless shrug. “I’ve made sure they’ll all be in the northern part of the continent. That should keep the Cotheeria occupied long enough for you and Manfred to hold the gate at the other end of the connection.”
“Good,” Manfred said. His hoarse voice sounded like it had been burned to a crisp by too many nights breathing the smoke of campfires, of drinking cheap ale. “Come along then, Wren. I’ll want you to take your hunters up to whatever high ground you can find and cover my men.”
“Understood.” Wren followed him out and down the hall to the cavernous chamber that contained the rift’s waystone. There, scores of armed men and women waited for them, clustered together on top of the stone.
“As soon as you’ve got a hold of yourself,” Manfred shouted to them, “you run off the stone. You make room for our brothers and sisters to get back through our lines. They know we’re coming, and they’ll make a rush for it. Archers, crossbows, take time to pick your targets. It’s going to be chaos, and I don’t want any of our own people taking a friendly arrow through their neck.”
Already, the waystone was glowing. Wren pulled her bow off her back, drew an arrow from her quiver, and nocked it to her string. Then, she waited while the light built, brighter and brighter, and then exploded upward.
Once she could see again, Wren stumbled off the waystone and into the cold northern air. The column of light rising from behind her cast her shadow forward, and she was glad she had her back to it. All around her, people were shouting and screaming in panic.
Soltheris was the largest port of the Eld, for all that it was only navigable for part of the year. Off to the east, Wren could see a forest of masts, marking the fishing fleet safe at anchor. To the south and west, she could make out a great range of mountains. Around them, houses built of northern larchwood, with sharp peaked roofs designed to shed snow, rose two and three stories high. That was where Wren needed to be.
“Red Shield hunters, with me!” Wren cried, and shifted into her bat form. She beat her wings, swooping up onto the roof of the nearest home, then turned back to her human form and crouched in the crusted snow.
There, an Eldish guard thrust a spear through the leg of a woman sprinting for the waystone. Wren’s arrow took him in the throat, and he was spun about in a spray of blood. The refugees broke for the waystone in waves, from all around. Some came from alleys, others simply turned from market stalls where they’d pretended to shop. The door of an inn banged open, and two men sprinted out, running for the column of light.
The city guard responded to the sudden presence of armed warriors quickly, Wren had to give them that. They poured in from every direction in small groups, and every one of them was better armed and equipped than her hunters. The Red Shields weren’t soldiers: they were taught to stalk their prey in the jungles silently, and kill with a single arrow to the neck, or to the heart.
Manfred, on the other hand, was not only a mercenary of many years, but now one of Ractia’s most favored captains. He raised his hand, and a fountain of blood erupted from one of the Eldish guards, leaving him nothing but a shrivelled husk, dead on the stones of the street. Not content to let the gore simply fall to the ground, Manfred stuffed it down the throat of another guard with a wave of his hand, choking the man with viscera.
Wren had lowered her bow without even realizing it, and her hand hovered over the arrows in her quiver. All throughout the streets beneath her, men and women were dying. The guards fought because they thought they were being invaded; the worshippers of Ractia fought to get to the waystone; and Manfred’s men fought to hold the line. It was chaos. For every one of Ractia’s faithful who leapt into the column of light, another one was cut down.
“Is this really going to be the end of it?” Wren asked herself, up on the lonely rooftop. Would the Eld who lost fathers and brothers and sons today simply let that grudge go, or would they blame the people who had, from their point of view, attacked their city? Would they come west to Varuna, to get revenge?
“We wanted a child,” Wren’s cousin had said. “Not a war.”
Wren didn’t regret the fact that Blossom existed. Her niece was kind, a happy, laughing girl who’d never complained about a childhood spent on the move, whether in the jungles or in the mountains. But she also didn’t see any reason that the Elden guards in the streets below her deserved to die.
What would her father say? Not the grim, glowering man of recent years, but the kind chief she’d grown up with? Would the Nighthawk of her childhood have counted all of this killing as a price worth paying for the return of their goddess? Or, if he could have seen what Wren was watching right now, would he have changed his mind, and told her never to go to Whitehill?
The little girl she’d pulled out of the ice, the same one who’d caught her with the idol, had pinted ears just like the people below. She’d be grown now; for all Wren knew, she could be one of the Eld in this city right now. How ironic would it be to have saved the life of the child, only to put an arrow in the woman years later?
An arrow whistled past Wren, and she jerked back, slipping and sliding down the crust of snow that covered the roof. As she tumbled off into open air, she changed, catching the wind with her wings and swooping up into the sky.
It would be easy enough to find another vantage point, another rooftop, and go back to work with her bow. Wren knew that was what Manfred would expect her to do, and her father, and the goddess herself.
Instead, she circled above the city and turned south toward the mountains.
Comments
Dave N
thank you!
Jacob Doppenberg
She hears the mountain song. Tftc!
John Koor
“I’ve made sure they’ll all be in the northern past of the continent. " past > part had pinted ears just like the people > pointed
Gopard
Thanks for the chapter!
n
I love the pacing of this series
Maritienna
"covered the rood" -> "roof" "Mandred would expect her" -> "Manfred"
George R
Thanks for the chapter
william wallace
So looks like Liv is going to need to fight some monsters. Bets on if the mana wave hits during matthews wedding?
