He wrenched himself to a halt, panting soundlessly.
Now I know.
The Unicorn pranced happily.
I will follow you. There may be a small delay, good outlander. Go quickly. Be the Champion of Driadorn I already know you are.
Kevin turned, and faded into the light.
* * * *
The exit from the Unicorn’s horn squeezed him so hard that Kevin felt his feet come out of his ears. He
landed with a thump on his tailbone. His legs refused to work properly.
Almost close enough to spit upon, Brian stood nearby, his back to Kevin and Alliathiune as he watched the Drakes swoop lower and lower, almost touching the towering
kalar trees with their bellies as they rushed toward the Sacred Well. Abruptly, a larger, darker shadow sprang up from the trees, and with a swipe of his claws and a snap of his jaws sent the Drakes scattering in a panic.
“Ah,” said Brian. “Amberthurn reveals his hand at last.”
Amberthurn, twice the size of any of the Drakes, dashed his enemies left and right in an almighty rage. The roar of his Dragon-fire crackled over the trees. But the Drakes were many, and fierce. They quickly rallied together and banded around Amberthurn. A sharp aerial skirmish developed.
Kevin tried to push himself to his feet, and failed. His muscles would not obey.
Brian whirled on his heel, making his cloak flare behind him. “Ah, my skiving, conniving little brother returns. Watch me, brother. Because it’s the last thing you will do.”
Beyond Brian, the Unicorns and Druids looked on helplessly. A catapult twanged, but the rock smashed against an unseen barrier. Of all the creatures in the grove only he and Brian seemed able to move, and the one-handed Dark Apprentice raised his staff and beckoned the Magisoul to him with a sharp whistle, as though he were whistling for a hound. The blue gem described a graceful arc through the air. Brian caught the gem in his fingers, and held it awkwardly against the staff. His other sleeve hung empty at his side.
“No,” Kevin cried out, weakly.
“A HA
HA HA HA!” thundered Brian, raising the Magisoul above his head. “I HAVE IT NOW! Power! Power beyond imagination!”
In the skies, Dragon and Drake alike turned to regard this event with horror. Alliathiune
made a low gasp of horror. Brian assumed a grandiose stance in the open area, and addressed the world he intended to rule.
“I have the power to
uncreate your dismal world, you scurvy sons of worms! All Driadorn will bow to the Dark Apprentice! You will call me the Emperor of Driadorn! You will bow before me and own me the greatest wizard who ever lived, greater than Ozark the Dark, greater than them all! You would do well to whimper and scurry to hide and hole, you who denied my inevitable triumph. I will not forget! I will hunt you to the ends of the Seventy-Seven Hills!”
His gaze swept over the Druids, the Dryads, the Unicorns and their Honeybears, the Jasper Cat and Two Hoots the Owl, the Drakes and Amberthurn,
and the Greymorral Lurks clustered down near the river. He raised the stone.
“
For my first act, I shall rid the world of a pathetic loser–namely my brother, Kevin Albert Jenkins!”
This time, there was no dissembling. Brian snapped his fingers and floated
Kevin out on a bed of air currents. He dumped him at his feet and gave him a kick in the ribs for good measure.
“Now, little brother, let’s
see how you bleed!”
His pulse thundered in his ears
as Brian loomed over him, considering how best to exact his revenge. Kevin looked up. He felt neither fear, nor alarm, nor anything but an abiding sadness at the creature his brother had become. This seemed to infuriate and puzzle Brian. Perhaps he expected abject trembling. A flinch as he raised his arm. Begging, perhaps. An opening of his bowels. But Kevin knew he would never do that again.
The Dark Apprentice
opened up with a conflagration, enough to call a decent bonfire, but Kevin did not even twitch. He simply endured the heat and flame and emerged as cool as a cucumber when Brian ran out of patience. He rose to his feet and bowed slightly to Brian, as though to acknowledge a parting.
Lightning stuck from the skies, making Alliathiune cry out in horror. But
Kevin raised his blue hand, and walked away from his brother as he focused on directing the seething energies to raise the turf their landing had displaced and set it back in place.
“I was in the mood for a
little gardening,” he explained.
Brian’s eyes bulged. “Well
, if you won’t die, then your pet Dryad certainly will!”
The staff scythed through the still afternoon air, spitting spinning wheels of razor-sharp steel that flashed at Alliathiune, who instinctively
tried to duck, only to discover that not one made it past Kevin’s upraised arm. The stream of blades described a mathematical arc terminating abruptly in the ground at Kevin’s feet.
“Nice try, Brian.”
The Dark Apprentice screeched in rage as his attack was disrupted. But he did not hesitate. Drawing deep of the Magisoul’s power, he shaped a fireball hotter and more intense than what he had ever attempted before. His face glowed as though he were a smith bending over his furnace. It caused the front of his robes to smoulder and smoke. And then he unleashed this small, white-hot globe at Kevin.
This time there was an effect. Given the amount of magic and matter involved, the concentrated fireball had inertia that even
Kevin’s shielding could not negate. The concussion knocked him backward, to his knees, but despite the shock he was otherwise unharmed.
“
Be freed of his tyranny, good Dryad.”
Brian
gaped. The Dryad was free! The ropes sagged off her body and uncoiled themselves from the Arch of Indomalion. Not only that, but the collar about her neck unsnapped and fell to the ground. “No! You can’t do that!”
“
Afraid we’re losing our touch, old man? I wonder if that’s how Father must have felt just before the Unicorns defeated him?”
Brian’s teeth ground together audibly. He shrieked,
“Then taste the power of the Dark Apprentice! I hope you rot in Hell, you little creep!”
The
Magisoul flared, pumping into the staff the power that Brian demanded. “More!” cried the Dark Wizard. “More!” The staff began to glow; first red, then orange, then as yellow as sunlight, so brightly that none could look upon it. His fingers must have been burning, but he was beyond feeling now.
Brian threw back his head and laughed a humungous, triumphant laugh that shook the Sacred Grove, bringing rocks tumbling down from the heights. The Forest groaned and rustled
, shedding leaves as though the Blight had advanced seasons in a lighttime.
The demented voice rang clear above the commotion: “MORE!”
A strong wind rose from the north, bringing with it the smell of rain and a storm the likes of which the Forest had never endured in all its long history. Under the impetus of magic, dark-bellied clouds boiled across the sky at supernatural speeds, bringing a preternatural twilight to the Sacred Grove. Brian intended to annihilate the Seventy-Seven Hills. He would start with a clean slate. Kevin saw, but his mind was clear. One purpose moved him. He stretched out his hands to grasp the staff.
“No!” Alliathiune cried out
, but was flung back by the power surrounding the brothers. “No, Kevin!”
“MOOOOOREE!” scr
eamed the Dark Wizard. The tendons of his neck stood out in sharp relief. “I will fling this pathetic Forest into the Endless Ocean! I will burn it and blast it until there is nothing left but slag pits in an endless wasteland!”
And he had all the power of Feynard’s greatest
fount of magic to work with.
Kevin
ignored him. His fingers curled around the staff. It was melting in the conflagration of cosmic energies pulsating through it, energies that legend told had been shaped by Elliadora herself when creating the realm of Driadorn and its many creatures. Kevin’s back arched almost to its breaking point. His mouth opened in a rictus of agony. But he had a death’s grip on the staff. Perhaps he thought to touch the Magisoul with his bad hand and cut off the flow of Brian’s power. That option was removed as his good flesh fused to the superheated metal.
Kevin
felt as though he was a meteorite burning across the sky. Evil seared his soul like a white-hot brand, scarring him in ways that he scarcely understood. Brian’s base nature was revealed to him in its entirety, and still there was more–the presence of Ozark the Dark, somehow subsumed into Brian’s psyche. Deeper still lurked the magic. It always had the potential for either good or evil, but when a man sold his soul for power, the result was eternal enslavement. He distinguished the Kraleon’s stamp, the way the dark creature had cunningly usurped Brian’s mind, shaping him into what he had become, giving him the tools and the words and thoughts beyond anything poor Brian Jenkins had ever dreamed.
Kevin realised how desperately Brian must have hungered to free himself of the Kraleon’s corrupting influence. But it was too late now.
He opened his mind. He became a conduit. Surrounding the totality of Brian’s undertaking, Kevin drove that torrent of raw force down into himself. He became a sacrifice.
That was what he intended. He would sooner himself be cast down than see his own flesh and blood destroy Driadorn. In part he did it for love, which was one of the conclusions that he had drawn earlier. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that he loved Alliathiune. He had for a long time, but had never been able to recognise it, or if he had, could not rise above his
own sense of unworthiness. But the other aspect was his love of life. Kevin had grown to respect the entity these creatures called their Mother Forest. He loved Her life and he loved Her ways. Coming back to the Well had drummed that realisation home. So it was for love and for grief that he opened himself.
The pain was overwhelming, purifying, unimaginable.
Kevin distinctly felt his heart stutter twice. It was like what he had done before in defeating the Dark Apprentice, by negating and absorbing his most diabolical deeds–only this time, his brother was holding the Magisoul. He might as well open his mouth to swallow an ocean.
The shock in
Brian’s eyes told him he felt what was happening. He felt the deduction. The clouds halted their march across the sky like a flock of sheep without a leader. Brian’s magical shield dropped. His Dark Wizard voice, his armour, all the spells at his command, came into focus. He must suffer his magic to drain into his brother, as though Kevin had become a black hole, insatiable and inescapable. He could not break the connection.
H
e lost his nerve.
“Never!” screamed
Brian, pouring his entire being into the staff. “You … will not … prevail!”
Kevin
’s blue hand shot off the staff to point like a rigid marker at the Well. Magic discharged across the intervening space in a single, impossibly unending bolt of lightning.
First to go was the automaton. There was a detonation, a plume of smoke, and a few bits of metal came spinning down from the heights. But there was so much
! Kevin wrenched his mind to the Well’s vast reservoir, cleansing it of every last trace of the Blight. Moreover, he expended the Magisoul’s resources upon healing the trees and bushes, soil and roots, beasts and intelligent beings, as far as he could reach. It was not enough, but it covered an enormous tract of Driadorn’s Forest, and in so doing, he drained the Magisoul to its last drop.
The Dark Apprentice screamed again, “No! You cannot take it away!”
Although he recognised what was happening, but did not understand it, Kevin was unable to halt the unidirectional flow. The magic of the dark arts was greedy and selfish, seeking nothing but its own survival.
Bereft of power, the staff cracked and withered as though eaten from within. The terrible storm
beat a full retreat now, dissipating at Garlion’s cheerful touch. Brian’s face became a mask of utter devastation.
“You
…”
Kevin
’s knees crumpled.
“You’ve
stolen my power.”
His head stuck the grass, bounced, and fell to one side.
“
What have you done?”
Brian’s hand worked convulsively against his chest
. He was ashen-faced, as grey as a man suffering a heart attack. His eyes lit on the long knife he had used on Alliathiune. Releasing the staff and the Magisoul, he stumbled away to fetch the knife.
“I’ll
… kill you,” he sobbed, brokenly.
Kevin
could not even lift his head. There was no strength left in him. He felt Alliathiune rush to his side, her hand slip gently beneath his neck. “Kevin, oh, Kevin … oh please Mother, don’t let him die …”
His
outflung hand dropped against the base of Zephyr’s horn. His eyes swivelled to regard a tiny spark which formed on his fingertip, and hesitated before making the leap to the horn. As if the first had been a scout, it was chased at once by a couple more, and then a small flood of sparkling particles leaped onto the double-spiralled surface and scampered across it like playful children.