Aisia, her bare skin coated in frost, tumbled out of the broken casket and across the metal floor. Shards of glass cut the woman’s skin, somehow still a shade darker than Liv’s even after going so long without the touch of the sun. She scrambled to her feet, eyes wide, and then pressed herself back against the nearest casket, arms raised to protect herself.
“Arjun, take care of her,” Liv commanded. Then, she whirled to face the desperate fight at the front of the room, where a second wyrm was trying to squeeze its way in through the door. The roar of Ghveris’s weapons had ceased, leaving the torn and bloody carcass of the monster he’d been attacking to twitch on the floor, within a spreading pool of blood. Wren, in her new form, had lost a few scales and was bleeding herself, but was still up, her head swaying and fangs bared as she prepared to face off against the new arrival.
She never got the chance.
Liv reached forward, having kept the spell she’d used to free Aisia from her casket, and two marbled hands of coherent mana shot across the room. She grabbed the lower jaw of the new wyrm with the left, the upper jaw with the right, and yanked them apart until the bones of the skull gave way completely and the head tore apart in her grasp, spraying blood up and outward. Then, she threw the corpse aside into the corner of the room.
“Liv!” Keri cried, spinning about to face her. She saw his shoulders sag in relief, and it was no surprise: the entire entrance was covered in the corpses of mana beasts, not only wyrms, but those strange insects they’d encountered on the surface of the crater, as well.
“Is everyone alright?” she shouted back to him, hurrying up the center aisle. Liv saw Sakari and Karina, blades in hand, and there was Kaija - but she was tallying names in her head, and the number wasn’t adding up.
“Lina was torn in half by one of the wyrms,” Keri answered. Liv saw his eyes flick across the room, and when she followed his gaze, there lay a pair of boots, legs - and then nothing else.
That explained the whiff of vomit she smelled, and how the skin of Karina’s face had a sickly tinge.
“We’re leaving,” Liv declared, raising her voice loud enough for everyone to hear her. “Get one of the extra scarves on Aisia, and try to wrap her up in something,” she told Arjun. “Ring counts?”
“Not good,” Keri admitted. “I’m out.”
“Me too,” Karina said.
“Six,” came Arjun’s voice, from behind Liv.
“Only a ring left,” Kaija said.
“Six, as well,” Sidonie declared.
“Nine. I was mostly keeping the venom away,” Sakari admitted.
“Well, I’ve got eighteen rings left,” Miina said. “All I did was hold a single ward from activating.”
Liv grimaced, and let her conjured hands fade into motes of sparkling mana. She and Miina were the ones who were going to have to bear the brunt of any fighting they did on the way back to the encampment - the two of them, and the Red Shields. Wren looked more than ready to fight in her new form, Soaring Eagle had his spear, and Ghveris would be able to cut through most mana beasts with his arm-blade even if he ran out of ammunition.
“Wren, Soaring Eagle, and Ghveris, cut our way out,” she commanded. “Sakari, stick close behind them and keep doing whatever you can about venom, but stay out of a direct fight. You three are the vanguard. Miina, keep everyone in the middle of the pack alive, and don’t hold back. If that means dusting anything that comes at you, do it. Arjun, save what you have left for healing. Sidonie and Karina, stay with Aisia and keep her moving. She’s been frozen for a very long time, and I don’t trust her legs. Keri, keep us all lit as long as you can. I’ll be right behind you all as soon as I ward this place.”
She dashed back to the pack Keri had put under her head while she was sleeping, and dug through the contents until she came up with a small sack of mana stone dust. Bald Peak had produced very little mana stone since the summer, because Liv had been hesitant to do anything that might cut off the waystone, or harm the bloom in the depths. Still, the construction on the mountain top had meant clearing out a small vein or two in order to make room, and that had left her with a very small amount of ground stone to use.
Liv waited until her companions were out of the room, and the sounds of the unleashed Red Shields had faded, before she loosened the drawstring around the neck of the sack and then carefully poured out a thick, unbroken line of dust. Then, she carefully stepped over the ground stone, drew the stormwand, and touched it to the powder. “Celēvant Cwo Ferent Sceria,” she murmured, and let four rings of her mana reserves drain into the ward, leaving her with only seventeen. The dust began to glow with a faint blue light, visible evidence that the ward had settled into the dust. Liv turned her back to the chamber and rushed after her friends.
Telling Wren and Ghveris to clear the way back had been, apparently, something like telling the Hall of Bricklayers and Masons they had permission to knock an old building down to clear space for new construction. Liv jogged past the corpses of golden insects which had been crushed into a pulp, sliced in half, and occasionally stabbed through by Soaring Eagle’s spear. She kept the stormwand in her right hand, and used the left to steady herself against the ancient walls of the ruins.
Now that she was trying to move quickly, the pounding headache from her attempt to use the crown of Celris had returned with a vengeance. Liv thought that she might have been able to cope better if she could have closed her eyes, but of course she couldn’t very well do that while running to catch up with the others. As a result, she found herself squinting against the painful glare of the last orb that Keri had left to bob behind the rear of the party, and waves of both nausea and vertigo swept through her, threatening to send Liv tumbling down to the ground.
It didn’t truly surprise her when Keri caught her by the arm. Of course, he’d hung back to the rear of the group, waiting for her.
“I think this running is undoing all the good your soup did,” she gasped.
“You could fly,” he teased her, slinging her arm over his shoulders and half carrying her forward. The experience was something like being swung about on the dance floor during a masque, Liv’s feet hardly touching the floor as he supported her weight and hurried them along.
“I could,” Liv admitted. “But I only have seventeen rings of mana left, and I want to save it to deal with whatever Wren and Ghveris can’t handle on the way out.”
“Only.” Keri’s laugh shook his chest, which shook Liv, as well. “I’ll make sure you keep moving, then.” At the foot of the stairs, he did exactly what she’d been secretly longing for during their descent, and simply scooped her up in his arms. They caught up to the stragglers just at the top, where the brutalized corpse of a wyrm had been thrown aside to mark Wren and Ghveris’s passage. Finally, they came to the jumble of rock where Ghveris had broken through the thin stone above, and fallen.
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“I can handle the mana disk,” Sidonie offered.
Liv shook her head, and tapped Keri on the shoulder to let him know she wanted to be put down. “No. I want you to be able to cast at least a shield or two, in case it's needed.” Once her boots were back on the ground, Liv looked up into Wren’s serpentine, slitted eyes. “I’m glad you’re enjoying your new form, but I’m going to need you to do something smaller if you want me to pick you up along with the rest of us.”
“No need,” Soaring Eagle answered. “The two of us will scout.” He shifted, first collapsing into blood, and then solidifying into the dark-winged shape of a bat, immediately beating his wings to climb up out of the collapsed ruin. Only a moment later, Wren changed from her wyrm form into that of a second bat, and followed him.
Aisia said something that Liv couldn’t understand, and shrugged off Arjun’s arm. Liv almost called out to warn the recently-woken woman against following, but outside of the dream that she had controlled, wasn’t confident she could make herself understood. After a quick shift, a third bat climbed after the first two, and the moment was lost.
“I’ll just have to trust the two of them to keep her in one piece,” Liv grumbled, and then thrust her wand forward at the floor just in front of the rubble. A disc of shining blue mana formed there, and her friends and companions scrambled onto it. Fourteen rings, she counted to herself. Not counting her mana storage.
They all squeezed onto the disc, with Ghveris at the center. “I’m not going to set us down,” Liv said, as she lifted them up through the hole in the crust of stone which marked the surface of the crater. “I’m taking us right back to the camp, as quick as I can.” She set the disk to skimming uphill, after the three bats above, who swooped ahead, and then circled back.
With a grunt, Liv yanked the glove off her left hand, so that the rings on her fingers, and the chains which ran back from them to her bracelet, were exposed. “Take everything in this,” she told Keri. “It should be eight rings. That’s enough for two shots, isn’t it?”
He nodded, and wrapped his fingers around Liv’s hand. She could actually feel the mana moving out of the polished pieces of mana stone set into the gold rings, even though Liv herself wasn’t drawing on any of it. “I’ve got it,” he told her.
“Good. Take out anything that comes at us while I focus on getting us out of here,” Liv said.
She kept them moving as quickly as she could, without being afraid that she’d send one of her companions tumbling off the disk. They cut through a field of steam vents, where she would have plowed into the side of the crater if not for the guidance of the bats. The moment they emerged, some sort of giant vulture swooped down, but Liv forced herself to ignore it, and a single beam of scorching light from Keri’s hand cut the mana beast out of the sky.
When the rim of the crater was in sight, and the ragged foliage of the trees nearest to the edge of the rift, there was one more attack, as if the mana beasts couldn’t stand to let them leave unmolested. Dozens of golden-legged insects pulled themselves up out of the shadow of a ravine, then charged, skittering across the cracked stone and tumbling pebbles of the crater’s upper slope. That time, Keri let loose a blast from both hands at once, and kept the light burning for a long count of five breaths, sweeping the light back and forth across the ranks of the oncoming horde until not a one of them still moved. He left only smoking blood and blackened carapaces behind, and then they were past.
The mana disc skimmed up over the rim of the crater and dropped back down, leveling out. Liv swung it left and right to avoid the trees, and then there it was: the ditch and wooden stockade of the encampment, the guard tower above the gate, the scorpions atop the wall, manned by men and women who’d sworn themselves to fight for the alliance. Shouts came from the guard tower, and the gate was already swinging open before Liv’s disk had even reached it.
She flew them through, settled the disc down onto the ground and let it dissolve. Behind Liv, the gates swung shut again. Healers rushed toward them, and she could finally relax.
?
An hour later, stripped of her armor and freshly scrubbed of blood and grime by Thora, who’d seen to it that a barrel of fresh water from the nearest cenote was put aside for her use, Liv sagged in her camp chair, inside the same tent she’d used at Coral Bay and the Hall of Ancestors. They had, it turned out, been in the rift not only the entire day, but the night as well, which had passed while they were in the undercity, and now it was mid-morning of the day after she’d led her companions down into the crater.
The army cooks had been busy, and Liv had a wooden tray of fried potatoes and salted bacon, along with fresh fruits that Wren called huaya. They had a green shell that had to be peeled back with your fingers, and the taste was an odd sort of cross between sweet and sour, but at the moment Liv would have eaten anything which was put in front of her.
Keri was sitting on one side of her, and Miina on the other, while Soile, Wren, Soaring Eagle and Ghveris crowded around. They’d had to drag in extra chairs to fit everyone, even with Ghveris simply sitting on the ground, being very careful not to tear the carpets with the metal edges of his armor plates.
“We can classify this as a success,” Soile said, as she unrolled a fresh map of the area on Liv’s camp table. Past an ink tracery of the crater rim, the stretched cow-hide was entirely bare of any mark.
“I lost one of my guards, and I wasn’t even awake when it happened,” Liv countered. “Lina was with me all through the fighting in Varuna. She went to the Tomb of Celris with me when I was working on my archmage spell, and I couldn’t even get her body out for a proper pyre.”
Soile exchanged a glance with Keri. “She will be missed, but that was her job,” the Elden commander said. “I knew her. We both grew up in Al’Fenthia, Liv. She took a position as your guard, which means she signed up to give her life for yours. You can mourn her - I’m sure she would be flattered and honored - but she did her duty. She kept you alive, while you did what you needed to do.”
For all that the words made perfect sense, and intellectually Liv knew they were true, she didn’t want to hear them. “I should have warded the door from the beginning,” she scolded herself. “If I’d done that -”
“You weren’t thinking clearly after what happened with the crown, and you only have so much powdered mana stone,” Keri interrupted. “Any of the rest of us could have proposed a ward, but we didn’t. We had control of a choke point to defend, and there isn’t much of that dust lying around right now. Don’t blame yourself. And it was a success.”
Soaring Eagle took a drink from one of the goblets Thora had set out, and then spoke. “We did what we set out to do. We found one of the places where my people were being kept, and made contact with them. We knew that this would not be easy, and that people would be lost along the way. I know my words may not be comforting, but they are true.”
Liv sighed, and let her head collapse forward into the palm of her left hand. She closed her eyes. All she really wanted to do was to sleep, but that couldn’t happen for hours yet. “Alright,” she said. “Give me a quill pen and some ink. I need to mark locations on the map.”
“More than one?” Wren asked.
“Yes. I got glimpses of three rooms just like that one,” Liv said, “While I was using the crown.” She shook herself, accepted the quill from Thora, and began to mark what she’d seen of other ruins as well as she could.
“I hope that it goes without saying you should not make any further use of the crown here,” Keri said. “I don’t think any of us expected you to have that much of a reaction. Feic Seria wasn’t in good condition either, and Bald Peak’s waystone was broken -”
Liv shook her head, and winced. “Neither of those places was as extensive as Corsteris, before the Trinity destroyed it,” she explained. “You don’t understand how many broken enchantments there are in that crater.”
“Hundreds?” Ghveris guessed.
“Thousands,” Liv corrected him. She hesitated a moment, and then made three new markings on the map, labelling each one with a name.
“Antris, Asuris, and Iravata,” Soile read aloud, once Liv had finished writing. “You know where the corpses are?”
“Not that I think anyone should be going anywhere near them, from what I could see,” Liv cautioned the Elden woman. “I’m marking them here so that you can keep our soldiers away. In fact, it might be better if we drew circles around those locations and marked those off as areas we don’t want anyone entering.”
“The officers don’t need to know the details,” Soile agreed. “We’ll mark a different map for them, without those names. We can -” she broke off as one of Liv’s personal guards held aside the canvas flap at the entrance to the tent, allowing Arjun, Sidonie and Aisia inside.
“She’s healthy enough to speak,” Arjun declared.
“Good.” Liv set the quill pen down on the table, and let herself fall back against the stretched piece of canvas that made up the back of her camp chair. “After all, she’s the reason we came here.”
volume nine is off and running!
here. I am more available there than I am here.
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. Not above being carried. [36+ Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]
Arjun Iyuz - Journeyman Guildmage from Lendh ka Dakruim; his jati specializes in healing magic. Going to have a lot of patients soon. [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. Would not win on the Price is Right. [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]
Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - A young warrior of the Unconquered House of B?lris, father to Rei. "So then I started blasting..." [20 Rings of Mana.]
Soaring Eagle - Husband of Calm Waters, father of Blossom. Red Shield Tribe. In a bit of an awkward position, to have other people dying to rescue his people.
Soile - A Commander of House Keria, now essentially Liv's general. Much more use to losing soldiers than Liv is. [17 Rings of Mana]
Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Has received a substantial combat upgrade.
