After months of being treated as a queen, it felt distinctly odd for Liv to trail behind Ghveris and Soaring Eagle. She’d done her part of this by bringing the two of them into the shared dream of the children of Ractia, and these people who’d been slumbering for a thousand years or more really had no reason to know or care who she was. Still, she’d gotten so used to squaring her shoulders, lifting her chin, and standing straight beneath the gaze of noble and commoner alike that to be simply ignored again was a surreal experience.
The doors to the dark fortress had been thrown open, and Liv, along with her two companions, ushered inside by the men and women trapped in this dream. Liv had hoped, when she’d cast the spell, that they might only be connected to a single dreamer at a time, but it seemed Ractia had opted to merge all her sleeping soldiers into a single dreamscape. Had the goddess done this because it was simpler? Had she been afraid that years of solitude would simply drive them all insane, or had the Lady of Blood not been planning that far ahead? Liv doubted that she’d ever intended to let her soldiers linger for this long without using them.
And there was that changeable, insubstantial quality that so many dreams seemed to have, which lingered here, as well. The precise arrangement of the stones in the walls changed when Liv wasn’t looking, and she thought that she recognized faces in the flames of the sconces set into the walls. Even the stars wheeling overhead were strange.
“There were a thousand of us, when we first came here,” Aisia explained. Liv was certain that she was the woman in the casket they’d cast the spell upon: she recognized the eyes, and those long, beautiful lashes that had been dusted with ice.
“It was supposed to be for a few months,” the man who’d spoken to them outside the gates continued. He’d introduced himself as Valis. “Time enough to train with the gifts the Great Mother granted us, before being called to war against the traitors. But the call never came.” Liv was amused that neither of them seemed to question how they were all speaking the same language, now that she’d warped the dream to her will.
“It’s impossible to track time here,” Aisia admitted. “The nights seem to last forever, and the sun to be already be setting the moment after it's high in the sky. But at some point, a long time ago, most of us vanished all at once. We assumed they’d been called to battle without us.”
Liv exchanged a glance with Ghveris, and she was certain that he was thinking the same thing she was: that would have been when the Trinity dropped a chunk of the ring on Corsteris, probably destroying most of these chambers.
“That was exciting,” Valis said, settling himself on a piece of rubble that seemed to serve as a chair. “Most of us thought that we’d be following them before long, that it was time to fight for the Great Mother. But time passed, and it never happened.”
“And then people started disappearing, one by one,” Aisia said. “Not all at once, and not in any sort of pattern. You’d look around for one of your friends, and realize that you couldn’t recall the last time you’d seen them, and no one else had, either. That was the same time the edges of the world began creeping in.”
“This place used to extend out into a vast forest,” Valis told them. “With mountain peaks rising in the distance, a river tumbling down over the rocks, and a great lake. There was game to hunt, and an enemy army camped on the slopes of the mountain. No matter how many we killed, every dawn they would be there once again, so that we could train.”
“But when the edges started to fade, we lost all of that,” Aisia added. “We had a few people who thought it was a kind of fog, something new that the Lady of Blood was using to test us, but anyone who went in never returned. And the parts of the world that went away never came back. It was like they’d been eaten.”
“That sounds horrible,” Soaring Eagle said, finally, looking around the ring of faces that were only half-visible in the darkness. “For your entire world to be eaten away at the edges, growing smaller and smaller, until nothing is left.”
To Liv, it sounded typical. For all that she liked to present herself as ‘the Great Mother,’ Ractia only cared about how her children could be useful to her. The moment she didn’t need them any more, they were discarded and forgotten. Still, she didn’t want to make these people angry - not because she was afraid of them. No, she was the only one in this dream with Cei, and Liv was certain that meant she could do essentially whatever she wanted here. To that end, she shaped herself a chair of stone, drawn up from the wide slabs of the courtyard at their feet, and settled herself into it.
Several of the dreamers cast nervous glances in Liv’s direction, but it was Valis who spoke. “May I ask, General, what one of the Cotheeria is doing here?”
Vakansa, Liv thought to herself. Or Eld, at the least. She resisted the urge to blurt it out loud, and was surprised at how violent her immediate reaction was. She hadn’t grown up among her father’s people, but at some point she’d absorbed the way they detested being called by that ancient slave-name.
“You may,” Ghveris said. “This is Livara t?r Valtteri. She is my friend, and her grandfather was the son of Celris. It is her magic that brought us into this place to speak with you, and many of her people call her the Lady of Winter.”
Now, all their eyes were on her.
“Celris was ever an ally of the Great Mother,” one of the men, who hadn’t yet given his name, seemed to remind Valis.
“That is true,” the man who seemed to be their leader said, after considering it a moment. “Do you have word of Ractia, Lady of Winter?”
Liv answered that question very carefully. “I spoke with her only a few months ago,” she said. Atop Nightfall Peak, while we were trying to kill each other. “But that isn’t why we’ve come here. For many, many years, the knowledge that any of you still existed was lost. My teacher, a man named Jurian, found one of these chambers some years back, but he didn’t have the time, nor the right magic, to try to wake you. After he told us, I promised my friend Wren Wind Dancer, and Soaring Eagle, here, that I would help them to find you.”
“How long?” Aisia asked, her tone sharp.
“It is difficult to say for certain,” Ghveris cautioned them. “Like you, I slept for many years, beneath the Tomb of Celris.”
“The calendar has changed,” Liv explained. “We track years from Mirriam’s birth, now, not whatever system the V?dim used to use. And we don’t know exactly when you were put to sleep.”
Valis and Aisia exchanged glances. “What year do you call it, then?”
“1253, now,” Liv answered. “The new year came while we were cutting through the jungles of Varuna to get to you. Mirriam’s rebellion, and then the war, lasted nearly two hundred years, with fighting on and off over two continents. By the end of it, there wasn’t a single one of the V?dim left active in the world.”
The eruption of noise that followed, as every one of the dreamers tried to talk over the others, blended together into mere cacophony. Liv couldn’t pick out questions, but she could see the fear, shock, anger and bewilderment on the half-lit faces of the people in the courtyard. In fact, they were more distinct than they had been even a moment before, and when she turned to look, she could see the sky growing light with a coming dawn.
“One at a time,” Ghveris said, raising his hands, and his voice boomed nearly as loud as if it had come from his mechanical body, in the waking world. “You may ask questions, but not all at once. She cannot hear you.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“They lost, didn’t they?” Aisia said, once the voices had died down to muttering. “That’s the only thing that makes sense. She never woke us because she couldn’t.”
“The Great Mother is a goddess!” Valis scolded her. “She would never be defeated by her lessers!”
“Sivis was,” Aisia shot back. “That’s what started this whole thing, remember? The Lord of Storms, dead at his daughter’s hands?” She turned back to Liv. “Well?”
“Several of the V?dim were killed over the course of the war,” Liv told them. “Costia fell at the Well of Bones: I’ve seen her corpse. Ceria surrendered and allowed herself to be executed in exchange for a guarantee that her daughter would be spared. Others left - B?lris and Veitha, at least. They were sick of the fighting, or at least that’s what their descendents claim. There’s only a few people still alive who were there, but what we call the Trinity sided with Miriam. Arvatis, Sitia, and Tamiris. The story is that they dropped the sky on Corsteris, destroying the city, and killing the last four of the Old Gods who were hiding here. I’m guessing that would be when most of the people you were in here with disappeared, actually - I don’t think they ever woke up. I think they died in the machines that held them.”
“The city -” one of the women, her face lit orange by the dawn, looked to already be crying. “It’s really gone? Destroyed?”
“For a thousand years, now,” Soaring Eagle said. “You are all buried beneath the rubble of a city dead and ruined, blasted away until only a crater remains. You are the few lucky enough to have survived.”
“But the enchantments are failing,” Liv continued. “The machines are breaking. The chamber we found you in, Aisia? Most of the caskets have already lost power. There’s nothing but skeletons inside, now. I think that’s why your dream-world, here, is shrinking, and why people have been disappearing. In a few months, or a few years, the last of the machines will run out of mana, and the last of the enchantments will stop working. When that happens, you’ll die, too.”
“Can you get us out?” Aisia asked.
“We can,” Ghveris assured her. “Liv can break the enchantments, and we will pry the caskets open to free you. You will have to come with us out of the crater, and it will not be easy. There are wyrms and mana-beasts -”
“Wait,” Valis said, looking between Ghveris and Liv. “Wait. You all told us there weren’t any V?dim left, but she also said that she’d spoken to Ractia not long ago. Which is it?”
“Ractia woke nine years ago,” Liv said. “She gathered some of her followers up and immediately started a war. This past summer, we fought her at Nightfall Peak, and forced her to flee. That’s when I spoke to her.”
Valis was already shaking his head. “No. I don’t know what is happening, but you’re clearly lying. The Great Mother would have woken us, if she was fighting a war. She wouldn’t have let us sit for nine years. And if a mere house-slave fought her, a little girl like this, the goddess would have ripped her to pieces. Tell us the truth!”
“The truth is your goddess abandoned you,” Liv spat back. “She either didn’t know any of you were still alive, or she didn’t care, and she certainly didn’t bother to send anyone here to find out. Maybe she’s still afraid of the place she died the first time, I don’t know. But as far as she’s concerned, you’re just broken weapons left to collect dust.”
She stood up, and at a thought, the chair she’d created from stone subsided back down into the courtyard. “But I understand if you can’t trust us, yet. How about this: Aisia, we’ll leave here and wake you up. We’ll get you out of the crater, and back to our camp. You can talk to people there, ask questions. When you’ve made up your mind, we’ll escort you back here and I’ll bring you back in to speak with the others.”
“How do we know you’ll ever bring her back?” one of the men called out, from behind the front rank of the dreamers.
“You do not,” Ghveris said. “But you have my word, and you know who I am. And if you do nothing, you will all be dead soon anyway.”
“Don’t,” Valis urged, turning to place a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “She’s admitted that she’s an enemy of the Great Mother.”
“What’s the alternative?” Aisia asked. “Stay here and die?” She brushed the man’s hand off her shoulder and took a step toward Liv. “Do it. Take me out with you.”
“There are two different enchantments I need to break,” Liv explained to her. “You shouldn’t have to wait long.” Then, she wrapped her friends up in Cei, and pulled them out of the dying dream-world.
?
Liv opened her eyes and sucked in a breath that stunk of blood, burnt flesh, and spilled bowels. Her head was cushioned by something that wasn’t quite soft - one of the packs they’d carried their supplies in, perhaps? People were shouting and screaming, and she rolled onto her hands and knees at the same time she drew the stormwand from the sheath that hung from her belt.
To one side of her, Soaring Eagle had caught up his spear and rolled to his feet, and at the other, Ghveris was already shifting, the metal of his armored plates scraping against the floor of the chamber. Miina and Sidonie still held their places at the wards, but Sidonie was now maintaining two mana shields at once. In addition to the one on the casket, covering the strip of enchanted black iron, she had her left hand thrust toward the entrance to the chamber, at the other end of the long aisle between the caskets, and perhaps a foot in front of her fingertips a pane of shining blue mana, veined with gold, protected them all from the battle at the other end of the chamber.
There, two enormous wyrms clashed, their heads and tails lashing about. With every movement of a coil, more of the ancient machinery that filled the underground chamber was broken and thrown aside. Caskets had been crushed up against the walls, and Liv saw one so thoroughly broken that the arm of a skeleton hung out. Keri, Sakari, Kaija and Karina were huddled just in front of Sidonie’s shield, clearly getting ready to make themselves a last line of defense. Each of them looked battered and blood-stained, clearly having already been fighting for quite a while.
Ghveris’s weapons whirred to life, spinning up atop both shoulders. Liv raised her eyebrows: the Antrian normally only used one at a time. “Lower the shield,” he shouted to Sidonie.
“Wait!” Arjun scrambled to his feet, and grabbed the war-machine’s arm with his bloody hand. Liv looked down to where he’d been sitting, and was surprised to see one of Wren’s enchanted knives, and a mass of bloody, raw organ meat. “Don’t shoot until she gives you an opening!”
“She?” Liv said, the words not quite making sense.
“Wren. One of them’s Wren!” Arjun said.
Ghveris began to laugh, a great rattling, rumbling sound. “Do not worry,” he told them. “I would know her anywhere, in any form. I will never hurt her.” He stepped to the side, making his way around Sidonie’s shield, and advanced to where Keri and the others were waiting.
“Can we let go of this, now?” Miina asked, and at her cousin’s words, Liv turned back to the casket.
“Not yet,” she said. It was hard to turn her back on where her friends were fighting, but she trusted that Keri, Wren and Ghveris could handle a single wyrm between them - especially now that Wren appeared to have taken a new form. “I need to get this woman out of her casket and break the enchantments,” Liv explained. “Hold onto those wards while I do. It’s one less thing I’ll have to think about.”
For just a moment, Liv considered using a blade of adamant ice to scratch the sigils out: that would cause the enchantments to fail, for certain. But the gradual ruin of the caskets in this room hadn’t resulted in the sleepers within being let out - only in their slow deaths. She didn’t want to risk any hard coming to Aisia, not when she intended the woman to be the person who convinced the rest of the dreamers to listen to them.
Instead, Liv placed a hand on the cold glass over the sleeping woman’s face, and closed her own eyes. She let her Authority reach out to encompass the entire casket, feeling all the enchantments there, just as she’d done with Baron Henry’s wards at the pass, the morning of the parley. This time, she didn’t take the magic in hand and cradle it: she had no intention of ever using this piece of machinery again, no matter what happened.
The dissolved the cold sleep enchantment, just as her grandmother had taught her to do. This wasn’t even the first time, though Liv wouldn’t have called herself practiced. Only then, when Aisia took a deep breath, the first in a thousand years, did Liv pull her out of the dream and open her own eyes again.
The woman’s eyes flicked from side to side, taking in the frosted glass, with Liv’s hand pressed atop it. Her head jerked as she tried to get free, and Liv could hear the dulled sound of her shouting from inside the casket. There must be a catch or a latch somewhere, or a command to trigger to open the thing up -
From behind, Liv heard a great, pained roar, and then the bark of Ghveris’s assault on the wyrm that Wren had been fighting. There was no time.
“Aluthent Aiveh Dvo Ghesiam,” Liv muttered, and two immense hands of brilliant blue and gold mana coalesced into existence, one to either side of the casket. “Get back,” she ordered Miina and Sidonie, and both women scrambled away.
Liv sheathed the stormwand, flexed her fingers, took hold of the casket with the two conjured hands of coherent mana, and tore the casket open.
volume nine is off and running!
here. I am more available there than I am here.
The Cardsmith, which is out on Amazon today!
Dramatis Personae
Livara T?r Valtteri Kaen Syv? - Archmage, former scullery maid at Castle Whitehill, the bastard daughter of Maggie Brodbeck and Valtteri Ka Auris. Mountain Queen, and Lady of Winter. Spitting some hard truths. [36+ Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]
Aisia - Great Bat who has been locked in a dreamworld by Ractia for a thousand years.
Arjun Iyuz - Journeyman Guildmage from Lendh ka Dakruim; his jati specializes in healing magic. Giving the key information, here. [18 Rings of Mana]
Ghveris, the Beast of Iuronnath - Formerly a Great Bat in service to Ractia, now the remains of his body form the heart of an Antrian juggernaut. "This is my friend, Liv. Some of call her a goddess." [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]
Miina t?r Eilis, of House D?ivi - Daughter of Eilis, niece of Eila, cousin of Liv, Lady in Waiting. Stuck holding the bag. [21 Rings of Mana]
Soaring Eagle - Husband of Calm Waters, father of Blossom. Red Shield Tribe. If he didn't hate Ractia already... this would have done it.
Valis - Great Bat who has been locked in a dreamworld by Ractia for a thousand years.
