Sword of Fire and Sea (The Chaos Knight Book One) (30 page)

A

t the forest's edge the trees thinned and disappeared entirely into a golden plain that ran in undulating hills to the horizon. This stand of trees was deceptively small, large for a small human standing inside it, but a pocket seen from the air—one that had grown up around the ancient stones of the Great Gate.

The wild land that had grown up here in centuries of civilization's absence had consumed almost everything save the gate. Stacked sandstone originally shaped flat and precise had been worn down by wind and rain at all its edges, and dry sun-loving creepers wrapped its base to the height of Vidarian's eye. The gate itself—an empty thing, a frame only—extended thrice the height of a gryphon, and was twice as wide. The remnants of stone foundations littered the ground a respectful distance away, and the ground at their feet was once paved with clay bricks, but few remained to fight the invading grasses.

Vidarian and Ruby carried Ariadel to the gate's threshold, and as they drew closer to it the sapphires increased their constant rumble of satisfaction and anticipation. By the strain written across Ruby's face Vidarian knew the red gems treated her similarly. When they gently lowered the
Destiny
to the ground, Ariadel's eyes fluttered open, focusing clearly for the first time in days. Vidarian's fledgling fire sense felt hers questing outward, awakened by the sudden flash and rumble of the rubies and sapphires. He knelt at her side immediately, taking one of her hands in both of his. From behind them, he heard Thalnarra's hiss of indrawn breath.

When Ariadel's own fire sense touched his, she flared up in his awareness, for a split second bright and strong as she had been the day they first met. But it was a flash, momentary only, collapsing even as it reached the edges of her faltering attention. “Where are we?” With their senses entwined, he could feel the plague raging within her, the elements that made her at war with each other. He knew how much each word cost her.

“We're at the gate,” he said softly, and felt the jump in her awareness as she comprehended his words. She tried to lift her head, but only for a moment—as her strength fled, so too did her sense, and she dropped away from his mind. He recklessly threw himself after her, nearly reaching out with the water magic that longed to break free inside him. With a grasp of will that darkened his vision for a split second, he held it back, to the fury of the still growling sapphires. He closed his eyes, mastering them, snarling inside his mind, then brushed his thumbs across her fingers and said, “I'm going to open it.”

With a force that would have thrown her to her feet had she the strength, Ariadel writhed in the flight craft, every fiber of her being shouting resistance. When her energy fled again, she collapsed back, again winking out of his awareness—then slowly flickering, fighting back up again. “The gate…” she trembled as she fought to get the words out, “…must…not…be opened!” Her body had nothing left, had burned through its reserves in their passage to the gate, yet in the depths of her soul's urgency was the strength to fight.

Vidarian was quiet for a long moment, consumed by the sound of her breathing—knowing as he had never known any other truth that he was not capable of hearing it cease. “Ariadel,” he said finally, “you'll die.”

“If I die, I die in a world I understand, by the teachings that have shaped my entire life. You don't know what you're asking me for,” she said. Even as the strength had welled up within her, now it fled, leaving her a swiftly collapsing shell.

“I'm asking you to live,” he said.

“Not at this price,” she whispered. “No one life is worth this price.”

“You don't…!” He stopped himself and breathed, swallowing the flash of sudden anger, warned by the renewed pulsation of the storm sapphires. “You don't know the price,” he said. “We only know what we've been told. I know that this is right.”

Her eyes were fading, exhaustion settling across her features. She shook her head as her eyes drooped. “I can't be this,” she said, her eyes pleading for understanding he couldn't find in himself. “You have to let me go.” And then her eyes shut, her consciousness pouring through his Sense's grasp, flowing down into darkness.

“How can you ask me to let you die?” he whispered. And a whisper in his mind answered—

What are gods for, Vidarian, if not for cruel choices?

Her spitefulness bounced harmlessly off of the wall of his grief. “It wasn't the
Quest
,” he choked, seizing Ariadel's hands in his, “it was you.” He looked up and into Ruby's ashen face. “I'm losing her!” He lifted her in his arms and stood, turning toward the gate.

//
I can't let you do that, Vidarian.
// Thalnarra's voice was quiet smoke in his mind.

He turned back.

//
We came to support you
, // the gryphoness said, indicating the gryphons behind her. //
But not in making catastrophic decisions. I did not aid you so that you could do this!
//

“But you aided me,” Vidarian said. “And for that I thank you.” As gently as he had ever moved in his life, he laid Ariadel in the blankets again. Her pulse fluttered under his hand, time escaping. He stood, swift, and drew his sword.

The gryphons behind Thalnarra hissed in promised menace, but she flicked her beak, warning them back. //
Do you know what you're doing?
// she asked.

Her simple question, untouched by emotion, nearly undid his resolve. As Ariadel had writhed under the weight of her priestesshood, so too did he falter under the specters of his father, his mother, his legacy. Regardless of its outcome, he knew his family's dynasty to have ended here, the thought of which threatened to still his hand. “What I have to,” he said only.

//
If you think that I'll hold back out of pity, you're wrong
, // she warned.

“I'd be insulted if you did.”

She leapt at him, claws outstretched, lashing out with a whip of searing fire energy. Vidarian fell to one side, half canniness and half clumsiness, stunned by the sudden leap. He spun away from her claws, but yelled as the flames washed over him, searing his face. Had he been in the center of the fire lash, he'd no longer be standing.

He pivoted hard on his right knee, darting in just behind the flames with a fast overhead slice of the sword, pairing it with a surge of water energy that leapt ahead of the blade and reached for the heart of her fire. But as his water sense extended away from him, the sapphires surged up, dizzying him, knocking him back. He aborted his attack and spun again, regrouping, while wrapping his mind around the sapphires.

Thalnarra gave him no time. In she lunged again, black talons as thick as his wrist flashing out for his intestines. This time the pulse of her energy was round, a cylinder of force large enough to swallow him entirely. But preceding the deadly heat itself was an aura of electricity, a warning, defining its periphery. Vidarian dove away and felt the edge of the attack just clip him, hot enough to curl the ends of his hair and fill his nose with the smoke of its burning. He had dodged her twice, but knew he couldn't be so lucky again.

Vidarian seized the sapphires with his mind and shook them, jolting them into furious action—and released their energy directly into Thalnarra's face. She roared in astonishment and fury, recoiling her own fire energy in a barrier against the stones’ onslaught.

“I never asked for this,” he said. “Your people had to throw prophesy into it.”

//
Humans
, // Thalnarra said, and the thought was rimed with insult beyond his comprehension. //
Shut up and fight.
// She leapt at him again, the powerful spring of her hind legs bringing her to him instantly, a thousand pounds of deadly creature with equally deadly mind oriented on his defeat. His heart and animal mind cried out in terror and urged escape, but he held them back, raising his sword before him like a talisman, a wreath of water energy wrapping the blade. The wave of elemental attack she directed at him this time was a sphere of fire energy that exploded into lethal spines as it neared him— in desperation he threw up the strongest wall of water energy he could summon, recklessly spending the fury of the sapphires into it as well.

Their energies met, resisted each other—and Thalnarra fell back, her wings flaring.

There in the moment, his mind and body tuned for survival, his spirit screaming out with the need for victory, he caught Thalnarra's gaze, and was stricken with the sensation of staring deep into her very being. Where he was attuned for the precision of his purpose, his every thought directed toward opening the gate to save the life of the woman he loved, Thalnarra was divided; distracted. She questioned. In that instant he knew the purpose of the gryphon battle ritual; it was much more than a barbaric grasp for dominance.

Truth bloomed, and the world dropped away while he seized it like an iron brand.

Something within him snapped, and both the storm's mad energy—a roar of water—and the fire's spiraling heat poured out of him, melting together, becoming one, becoming nothing. Before him, coiling around his blade, that nothingness opened up, a gulf that tore at reality. Here the Starhunter seized, boiling up from the opening. Thalnarra stared, transfixed as the Vkortha had been, and the goddess of chaos reached for her existence.

With a growl, Vidarian held her back, threading the energies apart again with his mind, but he seized on Thalnarra's distraction. When his sword arm came up, one of the gryphons screamed, an eagle's defiance, nearly startling him into dropping his wrist the full length. Instead, he stopped the arc of the blade with the strength of his arm and the reach of his water energy, seizing it in place. The edge hovered less than half a handspan from Thalnarra's exposed throat. He looked up at the remaining gryphons.

“Will you all stand against me?”

“Would it stop you?” Ruby asked, and her smile, full of sharpness and grief, filled his eyes with sudden water. She walked to him, the confident sway of a ship captain in her step, and placed the rubies in his hand.

“No,” he said, “it wouldn't.” And he willed the gate open.

The gate was a gaping maw, a depthless ocean, an unmaking. Here at the threshold between worlds the gemstones in Vidarian's hands warred against each other, arcs of electricity crackling between them and the gate as their energies flared and flickered.

Set me free
, she whispered, and the sound vibrated from the gate, prickling every inch of his skin.
Set
us
free, Vidarian.
Her presence loomed just beyond the gate, her energies pressing it outward in an urgent bubble of near emergence.

It was a mouth between worlds, a maw in the face of the universe, and before it all thoughts threatened to slip away from Vidarian. As he stared into the opening it was as if he looked into the night sky, doubled and tripled and quadrupled and onward into infinity, endless universes of which theirs was the tiniest speck.

You see
, the Starhunter said.
There are plenty of stars to eat. I really don't understand the problem with taking a few. If I wasn't supposed to eat them, they wouldn't be so delicious.
And there before him one of the stars very deliberately winked out.

It was his own mortal terror that drew him back into the moment and gave him the consciousness to release what the gate had held, back into the world.

A concussive force knocked him back, and he curled his body just enough to shield Ariadel with his chest and arms. The ground impacting his head sent a new kind of stars blasting across his vision, and all was black. By her yell of warning and the thud beside them, he knew Ruby had fallen near as well. Above them, the thundering of wings—thousands upon thousands of wings flooding outward from the gate, the wind of their passage rushing outward and pinning him to the ground.

Storms opened up around them, tearing after individual pairs of wings and the creatures that bore them. The sky broke with lightning centered in halos around individual flying figures, while others were wreathed in circles of fire. Most destructive of all, but thankfully rarest, some of them tore at the earth with powerful magic that effortlessly ripped trenches into the ground deep enough to swallow them all alive.