“Is it moving?”
“It’s breathing, certainly,” Miina said. “And moving around the crater. There’s dozens of other wyrms there with it, a clutch of eggs, and a withered old corpse under the water that I can only assume used to be Iravata when it was walking around. But if you’re asking whether it's coming this way, Keri, no not at the moment.” She glanced from Keri to Liv. “About the size of a keep, like at Whitehill. All coiled up.”
Liv stood up and pushed her folding camp chair out of the way. “We need Soile,” she decided. “And I need to send one of the Red Shields to Feic Seria. No - I need Akseli, a Red Shield, and Arjun.” If Lina hadn’t been torn in half by a wyrm, Liv might have called for her, instead, but now she was left with only a single guard – besides Kaija – who had a tether to Bald Peak.
“I’ll tell the guards, m’lady,” Thora promised, and hurried off through the open center of the tent to the entrance.
“You’re going to call Silica?” Keri asked, pushing aside his own camp chair and standing to face Liv.
“We have to,” Liv explained. “She’s probably the only chance we have to not fight the wyrm in that crater. If anyone can talk to it, it’s going to be her. But to get her all the way here from the high desert will take days, even using waystones. And in the meanwhile, it could attack at any time.”
“We need eyes on it,” Keri said. “Or at least close to it, so that we have warning when it leaves the crater. Red Shield scouts, in the air.”
Liv nodded, sucking in a deep breath to calm herself. She could feel how ready for battle her body was, full of nervous energy. The urge to simply walk out of her tent, fly over to the crater, and wipe the problem away with Skyfall was difficult to suppress. But if she did that, sooner or later she was going to have to explain to Silica why she’d killed first, instead of trying to talk. But fighting the monstrous, unknown wyrm anywhere but near Iravata’s corpse would only be giving up an advantage. The body of one of the old gods was a practically inexhaustible source of mana, and Liv would rather have it than not in a battle.
She found herself pacing back and forth across the rugs which covered the ground beneath the tent, and she reached to her hip for the stormwand more than once, each time feeling a flash of irritation when she found it wasn’t buckled there. Still, it would look silly to put her leather belt back on, after she’d just taken it off for bed.
Keri, in the meanwhile, had just dragged their camp chair back over to the table and taken a seat in his, slouching back as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
“I don’t know how you can just wait like that,” Liv complained, finally.
“The people you’ve sent for are on their way,” Keri answered. “Me wearing holes in your carpets won’t bring them here any faster. If there’s one thing a soldier learns to do, it is to wait.” He patted one hand against her chair, where it was set up at his side.
Liv eyed the chair for a moment. If she seemed to be nervous, she feared word would spread through the army. But if she appeared calm, her soldiers would, she hoped, know there was no reason to panic. It was a bit of play-acting, but she’d done more than enough of that since declaring herself queen. She settled into the camp-chair next to Keri, and focused on her breathing.
From the state of the others when they arrived, Liv hadn’t been the only one getting ready for a night’s sleep. Arjun was wearing a sort of dressing gown in Dakruiman silk, nearly bronze in color and cinched about the waist with a sash. Akseli’s long white hair was unbound, and Liv’s distant Elden cousin wore only a linen shirt and trousers; he must have been off duty. For the Red Shields, Wildcat came in his hunting leathers, spear and bow left outside the tent, but quiver still slung across his back and skinning knives on his belt. He wouldn’t have been Liv’s first choice, but she held her tongue. Out of all of them, only Soile wore armor, and the commander’s fingers were smudged with ink. Liv suspected that the other woman had been pouring over numbers: she’d gotten her own glimpse of just how much work went into keeping the army fed and supplied, and promptly decided to leave the matter in competent hands.
“I’m sorry to call you all back so late,” Liv said, once each of the four had found a seat. “We had Miina do a bit of scouting, on something of a whim, and she’s found something that we need to account for.”
“A wyrm at least as big as Silica,” Miina explained, examining the leftover goblets from earlier as if she were trying to recall which was hers. With a shrug, Liv’s cousin chose one at random and refilled it. “Crouched right on top of Iravata’s corpse, with a clutch of eggs and a whole host of lesser wyrms around it.”
“Blood and shadows,” Akseli swore.
Soile grimaced. “How do you want to handle this?”
“We’re going to send a message to Silica, tonight,” Liv said. “Akseli, you’re going to use your tether to get both you and Wildcat to Bald Peak. From there, have the college send you on to Feic Seria. Unfortunately, you’re going to have a hard time keeping up past that. Wildcat, you're going to lead Silica, by air, to this camp with as much speed as the two of you can manage. Arjun, I’d thought about sending you along –”
“You need me here,” her friend interrupted. “Especially if you’re going to be pulling dozens of sleeping people out of those machines. There’s a lot that could go wrong waking them up.”
Liv nodded. “Which is why I thought you might want to send a letter along with mine. You spent longer with her than I did, while you were helping to heal her wounds.”
Thora set a piece of parchment, a quill pen, and a pot of ink down on the table in front of Arjun, and he immediately got to writing. Once the lady’s maid had brought Liv her own supplies, she set to writing a quick note, only half paying attention to the conversation around them.
“We need a plan to maneuver the wyrm,” Keri was saying to Soile. “Scouts to tell us when it leaves its lair, to begin with; and then ideas for how to position it and hold it in place away from any of our people.”
“What color were the scales, Miina? And the eyes?” Liv asked.
“Black as midnight for the one, and burning like purple fire the other,” the other woman said, in between sips of her wine. “Much like the others here. Figure this is the mother.”
Liv wrote quickly, the nib of her quill scratching rapidly across the parchment.
Silica –
I hope you’ve been well since last we fought together, and I wish that I were writing you about something more pleasant.
We’re camped outside of Godsgrave, rescuing Ractia’s sleeping children from the machines and enchantments they’ve been resting in since the city was destroyed.
My cousin has seen a vision of Iravata’s corpse, and ‘a wyrm the size of a castle’ coiled about it, with black scales and burning eyes. I don’t want to fight it – for several reasons – but I’m not certain it will give us a choice.
You once spoke to me about the first clutch. This thing is larger than any wyrm I’ve ever heard of, save you. Could it be a survivor?
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
I’ve sent you a guide, Wildcat of the Red Shield Tribe. Please, come with him as quickly as you can. I fear that if there’s any chance we can end this without death, it depends on you.
– Livara
With the last stroke of her pen, Liv set aside the quill, blew gently across the parchment, and then handed it to Thora.
“How do you feel about the chances of our scorpions against a wyrm that size?” Liv asked Soile, while Arjun finished writing his own message.
“Not good,” the Elden commander admitted, with a huff. “I like Keri’s plan better. Which is not to say I like it well.”
Liv turned to her side, to meet Keri’s eyes. “Your plan?”
“We maneuver it into a place where you can drop your archmage spell on its head,” Keri said. “And we pin it there long enough for you to cast.”
“You need at least three scenarios,” Liv told him, and Soile. “One for if we need to lure it out of the crater; one for if it comes, and we have enough warning to intercept it before it gets here; and one for if it takes us completely by surprise.”
“I’ll have them all written by morning,” Soile promised. “Ready for you both to review over your meal.”
“Good.” Keri rose from his seat. “Then, if everyone knows what they’re doing, I think it's best we let our queen get some sleep – particularly if we’re going to be relying on her most powerful spell to put this thing down.”
Liv doubted she had any chance of sleeping at all, but he wasn’t wrong: Soile didn’t need her getting in the way, and now the letters were written, there was no reason for Akseli and Wildcat to delay. Soon enough, the tent was near empty once again, with even Miina slipping out, an open bottle of wine with only a few gulps left at the bottom clutched in her hand.
“It was a nice thought,” Liv told Keri, once they were left in the quiet. “But there’s no way I can lie down now. I might be able to do a bit of spellwork, but I’ve got a thousand thoughts running through my mind, mostly about what can go wrong before Silica gets here.”
“You do need to sleep,” Keri insisted. “Don’t you agree, Thora?”
Liv’s maid considered him with narrow eyes. “I do, m’lord,” she said, after a moment. “And I’m glad to have someone else to talk her into it.”
Keri stood up, walked around behind Liv, and took her unbound hair in one hand, drawing it aside to hang down past one side of her neck and cover the front of her body, exposing the back of her neck. The sudden intimacy of the motion sent a jolt of surprise through her body, and then his hands settled onto her shoulders, and his thumbs began to dig through the fabric of her dress into her muscles.
The noise that came out of Liv’s mouth was not a coherent word, nevermind a thought.
“I’ll make certain she goes to sleep,” he promised, from where he stood behind her.
Thora nodded once, then turned and left them alone, and Liv had the sense that the two of them had somehow negotiated a sort of alliance against her. In the moment, however, she couldn’t find a reason to care, so she closed her eyes and allowed herself to forget about the rest of the world for a moment.
?
“This plan is shit,” Liv grumbled, the next morning, with a mouth half-full of meat from a Varunan bird that had wandered too close to the edge of the rift, and been taken down by a Red Shield Arrow. Enough mana had been absorbed into its flesh that the army cooks had decided it could be served to her, apparently.
She’d been half surprised to find that Keri was gone, when she woke in the morning, and that Thora was waiting with her clothes for the day. At some point, he’d convinced Liv to change into her shift and lie on her cot, belly down, and she’d fallen asleep while he worked the aches and stiffness out of her muscles until she felt like ice that had melted into a puddle. She didn’t even remember when he’d left.
At her insistence, Thora had helped her get back into her armor, and had braided Liv’s hair so that it would all fit beneath her helm. The helm now rested on the carpet next to her boot, while she looked over three pieces of parchment, each prepared by Soile in an increasingly sloppy hand that told Liv just how long the commander had stayed awake the night before.
“You’re essentially going to use the magic you think most likely to infuriate it to lead the wyrm where you want it to go,” Liv summarized, once she was finished reading. “And then send in our infantry to hold it in place.”
“We’ll also use ice,” Soile pointed out. “And blasts of light to blind it. If we’re fighting near enough the camp, we’ll make an attempt with the scorpions –”
“Bolts secured to chains, I see,” Liv interrupted. “Do we even have chains?”
“I sent a message to have them shipped from Whitehill with our next supply run,” Soile answered. “Along with the anchors.”
“There’s no possible way any of this gets here in time,” Liv argued.
“Then we fight with what we have.” Soile shrugged. “But if it does come, we’ll use it. After all, you’re not actually planning to go roust the monster from its lair, are you?”
She wasn’t.
Instead, Liv and her companions escorted Aisia back down into the crater, along a path that had been marked by stakes and flags, and then through two checkpoints manned by Liv’s soldiers. The stacks of insect bodies next to the collapsed stone where Ghveris had found their entrance to the undercity told her that the men and women on watch hadn’t been entirely idle.
But to her surprise, there was no overwhelming attack, no sudden roar of a fiery-eyed black wyrm rising up from the center of the crater. With dozens of soldiers securing the route and her own escort, they ended up not having to fight at all. Now that a set of stone stairs had been spelled into existence, Liv didn’t even need to use her magic to get them down into the ruins.
The corpses had even been cleared from the chamber itself. Liv had half a mind to ask where they’d all been dragged off to, especially considering the size of the wyrms that her friends had killed, but decided she didn’t really need to know. Some collapsed section of the tunnels where they could rot away in peace, if she had to make a guess.
But despite the lack of immediate danger, she couldn’t help feel that the enormous wyrm Miina had discovered could fall upon them at any moment. It made her want to hurry through everything, to get the sleeping people out of their millenia-long dream right now, so that they could all leave Godsgrave behind without a pitched battle.
Unfortunately, it just wasn’t possible. Rescuing dozens of the dreamers, spread across multiple chambers, some of which her troops were only just now scouting, would be a process of days or weeks, not hours. It was something she’d known coming in, and they’d planned for it – hence the encampment. But they hadn’t planned to find such a massive, singular threat waiting at the bottom of the crater.
Liv was left to rely on the scouts Soile had sent out for warning, and to trust that if the black wyrm moved, they would find out with enough time to do something before it rushed them. In the meantime, she had to do her part, something that only the journeymen present could handle – which was why Sidonie had been left back to wait with the army, to handle the next chamber as soon as it had been secured.
This time, they’d even brought two small pillows.
“Alright, get yourself comfortable,” Liv told Aisia. “I’m going to take just the two of us into the dream, this time, while everyone else stands guard.” Everyone else was a substantially greater number of people, which made her feel both a bit self-conconscious, and a bit more safe. She got onto her back next to the other woman, and set her helm to one side.
“I am ready,” Aisia said. To Liv’s surprise, the other woman reached out and took her hand. “Thank you. For what you do for my people.”
Liv turned her head to meet the other woman’s eyes and nodded. Then, she muttered her incantation, and let her magic carry them off into the shared dream. Once again, she stood outside the dark fortress, with a nothingness at her back. It was difficult to tell, but when Liv looked over her shoulder, she thought that the world bounded by the dream might have shrunk even more, in the short time they’d had Aisia away from it.
The woman at her side, however, didn’t waste her time looking back. Instead, she ran for the closed gates of the fortress, shouting out in that ancient dialect of Vakansa, calling to the dreamers still inside. The gates gave way with a great groaning, and a small crowd of Ractia’s children gathered around Aisia. For her part, Liv followed the other woman into the courtyard, but hung back. It wasn’t her words that these people needed to hear.
“We thought you might be gone, like all the others,” one of them men admitted, a single voice amidst the clamour.
“No,” Aisia assured them. “It is exactly like Livara and Soaring Eagle and Ghveris told us. I saw the ruins, and the broken machines filled with the bones of our people. I saw the crater where Corsteris used to be, and the army of many peoples who came to save us.”
Liv watched as she took a moment to look around the crowd, meeting each set of eyes in turn.
“It is time for us to leave this place,” Aisia told them. “After so long, it is time for us to wake.”
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. Conspired against! [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. Come back to lead her people out of captivity.
Akseli - Member of Liv's personal guard. Drafted into service as a messenger. [21 rings of Mana]
Arjun Iyuz - Journeyman Guildmage from Lendh ka Dakruim; his jati specializes in healing magic. Has a dragon penpal. [18 Rings of Mana]
Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - A young warrior of the Unconquered House of B?lris, father to Rei. Good with his hands. [20 Rings of Mana.]
Miina t?r Eilis, of House D?ivi - Daughter of Eilis, niece of Eila, cousin of Liv, Lady in Waiting. Enjoying being the center of attention. [21 Rings of Mana]
Soile - A Commander of House Keria, now essentially Liv's general. Will not be sleeping tonight. [17 Rings of Mana]
Thora - Lady's Maid to Liv. Has determined that Keri does, in fact, have some use.