[written down by Johana Passerin]
Blue-green flames flared up inside the empty eye sockets of the thirteen figures. Three rushed at Taro, three at Vedrax, three ran toward the door upstairs into the tower, clicking their scalpel-sharp pincers. Klaes stood in the middle of this destruction. No one attacked him. Too many things were happening around him all at once. A strange state of detachment washed over him. As if the surrounding world were nothing more than a dream.
Talantius’s tower stood embedded in mold. A strange dance was unfolding around it: figures with powerful pincers swung wildly at everything around them, while people dodged away or tried to strike back. A mushroom-like entity, draped in veils and cobwebs, beckoned to it all from a fissure in the tower wall—a fissure leading into a strange otherworld filled with filigree structures and glitter.
Three attackers lunged at Vedrax. Only one managed to penetrate his defense, its sharp pincer slicing through the chainmail weave of his armor and the flesh beneath. Cold and terror instantly flooded him. It felt as if cold worms were crawling under his skin. He turned and fled, not even knowing where.
Taro tried to awaken one of her tourmalines and use it against the other three attackers. But the terror of what was happening around her bore down on her with newfound intensity. She had never actually been in such a gruesome battle. Her father had trained her in combat and her mother in magic, but her only experience using the stones in actual conflict was fending off wolves in the wilderness and once defending herself against a pair of tipsy bandits. Now she stood against beings of an entirely different order.
The stone slipped in her sweaty hands; she could feel its inner power, but that power always had to be awakened. The tourmalines from the city of Nemeiris react to shaking, squeezing, and other gestures, but these must be executed alongside proper mental focus, or else the released energy is not given its proper form. But the clawed monster was approaching dangerously fast. Taro shook the stone with a practiced movement, but the moment power began to radiate from it, her mind was not relaxed enough to shape it correctly. She felt that instead of forming a safe vault of a protective spell, the power merely bled out into the surroundings, warming the gelatinous air.
A pincer whished right past her ear. A second scratched her shoulder. A third struck her in the back. At the moment of impact, reality seemed to vanish for a split second, plunging her into a nightmare where hundreds of tiny crabs swarmed over her body, gnawing at her like a corpse washed ashore. When she snapped out of the vision, she realized she was running and had left the monsters behind. They stood there calmly, not pursuing her. Yet red flames burned in their eye sockets as they swayed from side to side, clicking their pincers. It was hard for Taro to get her bearings in the chaotic situation, especially feeling that the nightmare could bubble up again at any moment. In her haste, she caught sight of Klaes putting out his coat—Loverd’s incendiary charge had hit him too. His hair was singed.
Vedrax recovered and decided to counterattack. Finally, a task for a trained warrior. After days of uncertain alliances and doubts, he finally had someone before him who looked like a clear enemy needing to be killed. His dark heart rejoiced with murderous glee. With his halberd, he skewered both the pincer and the flank of one opponent. Thick, blue-white liquid poured from the monster’s wound, unlike anything in the mortal world. The creature’s red eyes dimmed and darkened, but it did not collapse to the ground as a human would have. Nor did it utter a sound. The remaining two—likewise silent—lunged at Vedrax. In a fraction of a second, the wounded one joined them too. The knight took another blow. His mind was suddenly submerged in pink slime, and he felt like he was drowning in it. It was disgustingly sweet, its aroma like the cackling of self-cannibalizing clowns. When he snapped out of the vision, he realized he was mid-stride, running away from his attackers. He stopped immediately—by Zilath, no Xalgonian knight would flee from battle!
Taro watched the exchange, and the knight’s heroism gave her courage. She hurled a tourmaline charged with explosive power at the three enemies who had attacked her earlier. The stone landed in front of the monsters, and the explosion knocked one of them to the ground.
Meanwhile, Loverd, who had earlier dropped an incendiary charge from the fourth-floor laboratory window and thereby sparked the clawed beings’ attack on his friends, ran down the stairs. In his hand he held a bottle into which he had previously poured Ignotium from a large carboy.Fire! Fire will cleanse everything! he rejoiced inwardly and imbued the Ignotium with the fire rune aurán.
Klaes stared into the fissure, consumed by sadness and pain. He tried to connect with the being standing up there. He sensed and opened his heart. Then he caught its vibrations. There was no human emotion, no anger or malice—only calm and composure. The behavior of our guardians is merely a natural response to the repeated attacks coming from your fearful companions. It is not an expression of hostility, but of protecting the threatened mycelium. I speak for the whole. I am the envoy of the Mykarchs.Stop attacking! Klaes projected his thoughts toward the Mushroom.Until your incendiary attack, our guardians were peaceful! it countered. Klaes turned and yelled at his companions with all his strength: “Stop it! Don’t attack them! They are only defending themselves!”
Taro heard him. Instead of hurling another explosive tourmaline at her adversaries, she created a dome of protective shield around herself, arching like a hemisphere from the ground to a height of two swords. This time she succeeded—and she could even move with this protective field. She stepped toward Vedrax, intending to shelter him under her aegis. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Loverd sprinting out of the tower gate and throwing something toward the clawed beings.
In the next instant, a terrible detonation blinded and deafened her. The ground shook, and Taro, along with her protective shield, was thrown a good fifteen swords away. As soon as she took flight, the shield closed itself into a sphere and cushioned her impact on the ground. She had no idea how the others fared, but it couldn’t be good. Rainbow-colored fires danced all around her, and debris and churned-up dust flew through the air. In the spot where the bottle thrown by Loverd had landed, a crater two swords deep yawned open. A rainbow pool had formed at its bottom. The entire tower began to slowly crumble, larger and larger chunks falling away, until finally a great portion collapsed to the ground. It took a long time for the dust to settle.
The detonation surprised even Loverd himself, whom the shockwave launched up the spiral staircase. By a stroke of luck, he didn’t hit his head while airborne, instinctively trying to cover it with his arms, but the rest of his body was bruised and his skin scraped in many places despite his clothing. The sounds of the world vanished, replaced by a loud ringing, and for a moment he didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. Shocks in the floor and an unpleasant swaying sensation brought him back to clearer consciousness. With extreme effort, he scrambled to his feet and realized that most of the tower was gone. The swaying was no illusion. He was standing on a piece of tilted floor jutting out from the remains of the outer wall on the third floor. On the exposed stone blocks of the tower, he saw runic inscriptions fading away. Something that until recently had perhaps held the tower together even during its journeys through space, but after Talantius’s death must have lost its cohesion. The towers of mages and dark lords usually collapse after their deaths.
Fox, it struck him. Fox had been all the way at the top when it blew. He shook his head as if trying to shake water out of his ears. He realized he couldn’t hear anything. I somewhat misjudged the power of that substance.
He tried to return up the remaining section of the staircase to the laboratory a floor above. But the laboratory no longer existed. In the end, he found Foxtrying to leap across the ruined stairs. He climbed down with her. He thought the fox was saying something, but he couldn’t reply. When they stepped outside, they saw four battle-ready clawed wretches looming over the limp body of Vedrax, whom the explosion had thrown ten swords away.
“What? They’re still standing?” Loverd remarked, and with a considerable amount of pain in all his joints and muscles, he hurled a dagger with an aurán rune at them. To his fiery heart, any mold seemed repulsive, whether it had claws or not.
Taro, who had not lost her hearing thanks to her shield, turned to Klaes, whom the tower itself had protected from the blast. The young alchemist swayed on his feet, mumbling over and over: “They are only defending themselves! Stop it! They didn’t want to hurt us.” Then he collapsed to the ground, deafened and blinded. He could not hear his own words. Taro knelt beside him and enveloped him in her protective field. Yet as she did, she felt a desire to connect with the Mold, or even to eat a piece of that white, fluffy cloud. Surely it would be sweet, flashed through her mind. She realized that opening communication with the mold would mean accepting it. She recoiled in fear.
She pulled a tourmaline from her belt pouch, shook it in a specific manner, squeezed its ends, and pressed it against Klaes’s forehead. He opened his eyes and sat up after a moment.
“Thank you,” he whispered. Then he stood up and looked toward the fissure in the remaining ruin of the tower, where the envoy of the Mykarchs still waited. The figure’s ruffles fluttered in the wind. He turned his mind toward it and fervently begged it to stop the attackers.We can stop our guardians, but you must stop yours. We want balance. We want guarantees, and that means your consent that we may act through you sometime in the future. If we stop the attack, we jeopardize our organism. In exchange, we want you, Klaes learned.
“What does it mean that you want me?” he mumbled.If you do not uphold the truce, we will act through you, human, the mold replied. Klaes was confused. He knew it was not wise to forge agreements in haste or under duress, but in the end he essentially acquiesced. Taro, standing at his side, sensed only some sort of accord. Then Klaes collapsed to the ground again, so she grabbed him under the arms and dragged him away.
When she reached the open ground in front of the tower, the view opened up before her to Vedrax standing on shaky legs, smearing his sword with his own blood gushing from numerous wounds. Four clawed wretches stood before him as if prepared to attack. Loverd’s dagger protruded from between the shoulder blades of one; Vedrax’s broken halberd hung from the side of another. Yet all four stood rigid and motionless. Klaes, still supported and dragged by Taro, broke free from her and shouted as loudly as he could: “Stop attacking them, they won’t hurt you anymore!”
“Are you one of them already?” Loverd roared at him, half reading his words from his lips as he weighed another dagger in his hand.
“Can’t you see? They’re standing still and not moving. I negotiated a truce!”
Loverd stared at him intently. He was still quite deaf, but he had the impression that he heard words distantly, muffled. Watching lip movements helped.
Taro let go of Klaes and ran toward Vedrax to stop his bleeding using hematite. Loverd lowered his weapon. The remaining clawed wretches withdrew.
Dusk began to fall. Glowing into the twilight was the rainbow-blazing pool at the bottom of the crater, along with flickering embers drifting here and there. The moldy gate also glowed dimly. Ignotium vapors formed an opalescent canopy over the crater. Suddenly, something large broke through the surface from below, flew over their heads, and landed nearby on the ruins of the tower.
“I saved you!” came a familiar squawking voice, though its size didn’t match what they remembered. It was Shard, but now he had reached the size of a sea eagle.
“Ah, sorry,” he noted to himself, “I got my times mixed up. I mean: I’ve come to save you!”
Upon hearing that voice, Fox took off in a frantic, confused flight.
“Yuck! Those black feathers again!”
Shard ignored her. “Boy! What a drinking spree here! Er, I mean fight! Are you all right?”
“This time it isn’t just my shadow bleeding,” replied Vedrax, whose eardrum was ruptured on only one side and who could hear something after all.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite estimate what the Ignotium would do,” shouted the hard-of-hearing Loverd guiltily. He sat down and tried to tend to his bruises.
“What!? You did that?” Klaes shrieked, veins bulging on his neck and forehead. “You used Ignotium and an aurán rune together? You could have killed us all!”
Loverd watched his lips closely and then shrugged. “It was in self-defense!” he then said, unnecessarily loudly once more.
“What self-defense! You triggered this when you willfully dropped an incendiary charge out the window on us! They didn’t want to hurt us! I just agreed on a truce with her. If we stop attacking, they’ll leave us alone. I can communicate with them,” Klaes cried.
Vedrax stepped up to him and wiped his bloody hand across his face and eyes.
“What are you doing!” Klaes shouted angrily. He felt that communication with the Mycelium had broken off at the touch of Vedrax’s blood. Vedrax jumped back and called out: “What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to protect you from delusion!”
“I didn’t ask for your help. When I need it, I’ll ask!” Klaes snapped at him, turning his gaze toward the fissure in the tower, behind which the glow of the mushroom realm pulsed dimly.
Shard croaked and fluttered closer to get a better look at Taro, who was also staring at him in fascination. His iridescent black feathers shifted in color from blue through green to purple.
He talks like some crazy, eccentric parrot from Garion, she thought, but the others didn’t seem surprised at all, and it looked as though they already knew him from somewhere.
Before she could ask, Shard addressed her: “Hey, who are you? I haven’t seen you with them before. I’m Shard.” He offered her a claw like a hand in a very human gesture. Taro shook his talon.
“I am Taro of Svittynis,” she answered politely and offered him wine. Shard downed the entire wineskin in a single gulp.
“Jaro or Taro. Pretty good,” he muttered, wiping his beak against the feathers on his chest and glancing sideways at her. “I’ve never had Svittynisian before. Ha.” He inspected her curiously for a moment longer, then waddled over to the crater and examined the aftermath of the detonation.
Taro hurried to treat Loverd and Fox. Their injuries were mostly caused by falling masonry and objects hurled by the shockwave, not by the claws of their opponents. Fox turned her head away so as not to have Shard in her field of vision.
“Make him go away! Just what I needed. Why! Where did he come from! Where did that nutjob come from in that crater!?” she lamented.
“What are you saying? Why is he here? Because Ignotium distorts spacetime, that’s why,” Loverd answered loudly and eruditely.
“But why him of all things? Why not something else?!” the fox also spoke loudly so Loverd could hear her.
In Loverd, this question raised troubling thoughts: Why not something else? What else could come through a rift in spacetime?
“What else can we do to destroy all of Qurand? We originally set out on this journey to save it! And we weren’t supposed to draw the attention of the powers that be!” Klaes shouted in despair. He wanted to say more, but Shard cut him off: “Come on now, that’s why I’m here. That blast was heard across all of Xalgon. The sky above the city is swarming with demons, and the Zilaths themselves have gathered for counsel at the Mirror Tower. Word is, it’s the end of the world!” he hollered in his croaking voice.
“It won’t be the end, only a new beginning,” Klaes said as if in a trance. Apparently, he had managed to reconnect with the Mycelium again. Vedrax immediately stepped up to him and stroked his cheek with his bloody palm.
“Vedrax! Your blood again? Why do you keep smearing it on me?!” Klaes shouted.
“So that you have a chance to decide for yourself!” Vedrax replied sternly.
Loverd joined in: “And do you even still want to close that fissure? Remember why we’re here? We set out from Svittynis two… three days ago to figure out where this mold comes from and what we can do about it. A week ago we went to steal your teacher Zeilet’s manuscript from Halit Altun’s vault to figure out why the elixir thins the wall. We went to warn Talantius.”
“But instead of pulling him out of his madness, we murdered him. You killed him!” Klaes interrupted, trying to clean his face of Vedrax’s blood.
“There was no turning back. He was completely in the grip of that mold, and you look like you’re following in his footsteps!” Loverd said. “Do you want to close the gate?”
“Yes, but…” Klaes said softly.
“We came here… to close the gate. To save Svittynis,” Loverd repeated.
Shard croaked again: “I heard it, that explosion. And the gate is still open, I see. But back in Xalgon they know where it is now. Ha. Kraa.”
“The lords of the black towers can travel in ways impossible for a mere mortal,” observed Vedrax, who was the only one who could fully fathom the extent of the alarm now reigning in his home city.
Klaes turned to the fissure in the tower. Lady Mushroom, as he named her in his mind, was still standing there. He slowly stepped toward her.
“What are you planning?” Loverd asked him warningly.
“Something isn’t right here,” Klaes muttered.
“I won’t let you go there!” Loverd shouted and grabbed Klaes by the elbow.
“Think of it from her perspective. It came here to get to know our world… It didn’t want to hurt us. She is an envoy…”
“It didn’t want to, but it did! Remember the eyeless people. The singing deer. The people driven mad by the mold. That guard locked in the barn with worms crawling in his eye sockets. All of that is the mold! If you weren’t blinded by the mold, you’d see that the holy flame was the only way!” Loverd said urgently.
“Ah, I keep forgetting that you don’t see what I see,” Klaes sighed, slowly but surely pulling Loverd along toward the fissure. Vedrax walked at their side, ready to intervene.
“And you keep forgetting that we have to close this, or Svittynis is finished, and perhaps all of Qurand,” Loverd countered. He stopped. Though it was nearly dark, the Ignotium vapors above the crater glowed, and besides, the full moon had risen. In that dim, silvery light, he saw a black head emerge from the ghostlily shimmering pool in the crater—twice the size of a human head, bald, glossy like an obsidian statue. Then it submerged again.
“There! Something is in the pool. I saw a head in the pool!” he said in a hushed voice.
Taro saw it too. Goosebumps broke out on her skin. The hair on the nape of her neck stood on end. Magic was in the air. Greater magic than she had ever felt. And with every passing second, it grew into an immense density. She felt it like a giant tidal wave. To her astonishment, she realized her teeth were chattering uncontrollably. The tourmalines on her belt began to heat up. She used all her willpower to isolate them from her surroundings and instinctively began to retreat as far as possible from the pool.
Shortly thereafter, the surface rippled again. Then dark tendrils shot out from its surface, weaving together. They anchored into the ground a short distance from the crater in about ten places and began to weave like the giant web of an invisible spider. Soon it became clear that a frame the size of double doors to a temple was forming.
“By Suvarna! I only know this from stories! It’s a direct portal!” shouted Loverd, who immediately evaluated what his senses and education were telling him. The tingling sensation he recognized as a sign of spatiotemporal magic carried an almost stunning power at this moment. In his nostrils, he caught the scent of darkness he only knew from the Mirror Tower in Xalgon. A two-page spread from a grimoire of spatiotemporal magic flashed before his eyes; it was the final page. Spells of the highest sphere. The last among them. Antar Aparaquranditha. The Complete Portal. A terribly costly structure. The long-term savings of a dozen average mages wouldn’t cover a single minute of this spell’s duration. Qurand is usually too rigid and dislikes portals. But perhaps right here by the Ignotium pool, it came at a discount.Xalgon. The Archons! flashed through his mind.
“Something is coming here from Xalgon. I think we should run,” he said in a strained voice. Shard squeaked and took flight. “Yes! Yes! Flee! Death approaches! There’s no time!”
“What is that?” asked Klaes, calmly watching as a black canvas laced with red veins stretched within the frame of tendrils. Upon it, initially painted as a portrait, appeared a figure of superhuman size clad in full armor. Klaes and Vedrax both recognized it from paintings and books. They knew the armor was made of amarantium, the cursed black metal; they knew that behind the visor hid the glow of red eyes. The titanic figure assumed three-dimensional proportions and stepped out of the image. It hovered above the pool, turning this way and that, while the surge of potent magic emanating from it battered their minds and whipped against the surrounding rocks and ruins, which reflected the invisible light of those magical lines as a ghostly violet shimmer. The levitating Zilath then focused on the fissure where Lady Mushroom stood. He raised one hand high, and the bones of the heroes resonated with an otherwise unheard outcry. He turned his other hand forward, and everyone felt that an incantation was taking place. Loverd and Taro saw—or rather felt—shield after shield layering around the Zilath, like a constantly growing steel onion with many layers.
“Run! Away! Away!” Loverd finally roared, jerking Klaes. Klaes hesitated. He turned toward the figure of the Archon and called out: “There’s no need to destroy everything right away! Communication is enough!” Loverd grabbed him and dragged him along. “Run, you fool, if you want to live!” Klaes reluctantly started running, but kept looking back. He saw dust, leaves, and eventually even stones lifting into the air. Immense forces were being unleashed. In the end, everyone joined the flight. Though they didn’t know exactly what was happening, all their instincts told them that something far beyond their capabilities was brewing. Taro remembered some terrifying dreams where she envisioned the entire world being swallowed by a dark gullet from the heavens, eagerly sucking up everything—trees, flowers, skin from human faces—until nothing remained in the world but bones and rocks glowing with the green light of death.
When they were about two hundred swords away from the tower, they stood on a low hill. They looked back one last time before the tower disappeared from view beyond the horizon. The Zilath hovered somewhat higher now; the onion-like layers of protective spheres around him were visible to the naked eye, glowing in the dark like translucent snake skins. The gate in the wall was now murky and covered in gray matter, and the envoy of the Mykarchs was no longer in sight. A struggle was taking place between the Zilath and the gate—gray tendrils of mycelium wrapped around the black tendrils with which the Zilath tethered the gate and himself to the surroundings. In the black sky above their heads, six bright red lights flared to life. The shade of their red seemed to speak clearly of the intentions they brought. It was the red color of blazing hells. The red color of demon wrath. The red color of the end of all days. Smaller stones were now beginning to lift off the ground around the companions as well. The gelatinous air was hard enough to breathe on its own, but now it was so thick with energy that spots danced before their eyes. It was a strange state of mind. Events of such magnitude were transpiring that the thought of dying in the next second actually felt like something that was bound to happen. They were facing the final moments of their lives. “Run! To the water! We must get to the water!” Loverd roared, desperation in his voice. “Taro, where is water around here, lead us!” No one asked him why. They obeyed. They ran. Downhill and then uphill again. Across the plateau and down the slope. Across wetlands. Over rocks and along the flat ground.
The six stellar objects in the sky began to pulse. Their radiance was so bright that with each pulse, the entire landscape flashed in a red glare before plunging back into darkness. They ran on. Their throats were already raw from frantic breathing. The red pulsation began to accelerate gradually. “How far is the river?” Loverd rasped out. “Close now,” Taro groaned, but to tell the truth, she was a bit lost in that ghostly light. The pulsation grew faster and faster. Several more terrible minutes passed, and the pulsing became as fast as their breathing. Downhill and a bit uphill again. Moments later, the pulsation matched the beating of their hearts. Now, now, now. The landscape vanished and reappeared so rapidly that it seemed as though they were moving through individual static pictures. In his mind, Loverd counted down the time to moment zero. In fifteen seconds we will all die. Then they felt sloping ground underfoot. Ahead of them lay the dark streak of the river. They sprinted down the final hill and leaped—or rather tumbled—into the water. Just before the waves swallowed them, they took a deep breath. The river was quite deep here. Taro swam two strokes down into the darkness and grabbed onto a large boulder, for otherwise her own deep breath threatened to buoy her up toward the surface. All around was pitch-blackness, in which she felt her companions only through accidental touches and unintentional kicks. She reached for her tourmalines with one hand, wanting to illuminate one of them, when suddenly — — A moment of total whiteness. —
Taro closed her blinded eyes, but the brightness was too intense even through her eyelids. White-red light burned into the back of her eyes. Suddenly, a wave of great defiance against this cosmic destruction rose within her. She clutched two tourmalines in her palm and with fierce determination instantly summoned a massive shield from them, which she hoped would cover the whole submerged group. The blinding light began to recede. Barely a few seconds passed.
Then the ground quaked beneath their feet, and Taro felt a strike against her shield as if a mountain had fallen upon it. Only a fraction of that force transferred to its interior. Even so, she had all she could do to keep the shockwave from knocking the breath out of her lungs.
Her eyes began to recover. The world above the surface still shone with white light. But down at the bottom of the stream, the brightness was already dimmer. The water was indeed protecting them from the worst. All her companions were under her shield. The water level was noticeably lower than before the shockwave, which must have swept part of the water beyond the banks. Stones both large and small began falling upon her shield. Everything that had previously levitated in the air shot outward, driven by the shockwave. Fortunately, the water slowed the stones somewhat, and the shield stopped the rest. The water at the surface was turning to steam and boiling just beneath it. Taro watched the effect in horror, wondering if the entire river would boil like this.
Fortunately, the white light faded, and with it, the boiling ceased. Cherry-red glowing stones fell from the sky like a frantic, giant hailstorm. A larger chunk of rock must have fallen somewhere in the river a short distance upstream, because suddenly a surge of churning water rushed in, the surface above their heads rose sharply, and the water completely lost its clarity. The companions clustered around Taro, including Shard, who held onto a rock with one talon and held the fox with the other.
The world around them finally went completely dark, but the rain of stones refused to stop. Their breath underwater was starting to run out. Moreover, in the pitch-blackness they remained thoroughly blind, glowing spots dancing before their injured eyes. Feeling around, Loverd tried to connect all the companions in a chain of hands and shook Taro’s arm as a sign that they needed to surface. Taro let go of the rock, and together they swam to the surface. They breathed in together, but immediately broke into coughing fits. The air was scorching hot, as if in the middle of a fire. Fortunately, only tiny pebbles were now rattling against her shield, but to their horror, they could now see their surroundings. The slope of the hill they had run down—the one sheltered from the blast site—appeared simply black in the night. But the opposite hillside glowed red, like iron pulled from a forge. Nothing living remained on it.
Under the protection of the shield, Vedrax scrambled toward the less scorching bank and tested its temperature. It was hot, but standable. The rain of pebbles finally ceased. Taro couldn’t hold the shield a moment longer anyway. Exhaling, she released her concentration, and fainting spells immediately threatened to claim her. Klaes and Loverd pulled her onto the bank.
For a while they could do nothing. They just sat, breathing the burning air, while the dirty, warm river washed over their legs. Reddish specks swarmed before their eyes, blending with the view of the opposite hillside, which was the color of glowing embers. In their ears, they heard only roaring, whistling, and thundering.
At times, they seemed to lose consciousness, only to snap back to the present moment again.
Finally, Loverd got up unsteadily and gazed at the sky back in the direction from which they had run. Six blazing stars still hung above their heads. They weren’t spots in their vision. They were there. And they began to pulse once more. Slower this time.
Perhaps even Zurvans and Archons need a moment to catch their breath.
“Come on, we must go!” he wanted to say, but his throat was completely scorched and raspy.
Vedrax shook his head and pointed at Taro and Klaes. They didn’t look capable of a fast march. After all, even Loverd was having trouble keeping his balance. The knight, who didn’t even attempt to stand just to be safe, gestured back into the current, which flowed quite swiftly and ran roughly away from the place of horror they had left behind. They all exchanged looks and nodded. They slipped back into the current and let themselves drift with it. Only Vedrax had a bit more trouble with it, as his armor dragged him toward the bottom. But he stayed near the banks in shallower spots.
Shard shook himself off on the bank and followed the company through the air.
After a while, black snow began falling from the sky. Before long, Klaes realized what it was. The gelatinous feel of the air had completely vanished. What was falling on them had to be the condensed and incinerated components of whatever made up the jelly.
A considerable amount of time passed. A sense of time and space began returning to them. Half an hour, perhaps? Maybe less. The pulsation of the red stars began shortening its interval again. It was nowhere near as fast yet, when suddenly, to their surprise, the sky lit up like day once more. Everyone instinctively covered their eyes. Shard shrieked and dove headfirst into the river. The others took a breath and submerged below the surface. But the radiance was weaker, perhaps more distant. The shockwave reached them with a longer delay. They surfaced again.
The strikes became more frequent now, but weaker and more distant. On one occasion, Loverd even dared to look back and saw each of the six stars connect to a certain spot beyond the horizon with a blinding red beam. Where the beams converged, a small sun shone for a moment. In its light, he saw a ghostly celestial spectacle—from the locations of previous strikes, mushroom clouds of luminous smoke rose into the sky, churned and shattered by strike after strike tearing through the atmosphere. Loverd wasn’t sure, but it seemed to him that the strikes were progressing systematically, almost mechanically. North, south, north, south, like a shuttle in a loom. They are uncompromisingly burning out the infection, like an inflamed wound, flashed through his mind.
They let themselves continue drifting down the river. Moment by moment, the air seemed cooler and cleaner.
Klaes felt a profound sense of loss in his body. Doom and ruin. A wasted opportunity. He wept, his hot tears mingling with the warm, ash-covered water. Deep in his soul, he knew the gate had been removed. He no longer felt even a hint of the connection.
They let themselves drift for a long time, just to be sure. They had to be certain they were far enough away from the area where the jelly had spread, or the red beams from the sky might find them again.
It was deep night now, but the sky to the east glowed with an orange light that looked like dawn. In that haunting glow, the full moon burned like a red sphere, a seventh, motionless light. When the river carried them into a calmer cove, they caught hold of some driftwood and rested before continuing on their way.
After several hours they felt utterly exhausted, but whenever they imagined the beams catching up to them again, they told themselves to go just a little further. Only when the real sun began to rise did they finally climb out of the water onto a normal bank covered in heather. They were chilled, battered, half-deaf, but alive.
Loverd, though on the brink of collapse, nevertheless rejoiced in his heart. He patted the limply lying Vedrax on the shoulder. “That was a close one. But those Zilaths of yours are no incompetents! No wonder they are worthy opponents to divine Suvarna. My lord wouldn’t bother with anything less.”
Vedrax said nothing. Neither did Taro. She was thinking of Svittynis, of her sister, of her people, and how she might never see them again. Those were the Zurvans Talantius had spoken of. The Burners.
Fox and Shard sat on the bank, water dripping from them. It was cold.
