Wytchfire (Book 1) (25 page)

Rowen aimed his sword at the sorcerer’s throat. “You sure?”

El’rash’lin met his gaze, unafraid. So piercing was the Shel’ai’s stare that Rowen drew back a step. “If you wish to slay me, Human, I will not stop you.” El’rash’lin’s twisted lips broke into a disconcerting smile. “Truth be told, I would welcome it.”

Rowen’s stomach soured. He sheathed his sword. “Why are you here?”

“A better question.”

Rowen threw up his hands in exasperation. “Can your kind ever speak plain?”

Unblinking, El’rash’lin said, “Plain it is, Human. I came here to die.”

The Shel’ai lurched then caught himself. He pointed to the chair left outside Silwren’s cell. When Rowen did not take it, El’rash’lin sat instead.

When the sorcerer spoke again, Rowen was alarmed by the weakness in his voice. “Like Silwren, I know what Fadarah is planning. Once, I agreed with him. Not now. We came to stop it. But the magic is too much. It festers, driving us mad. The more we feed it, the more it consumes. If we face the Nightmare... even if he doesn’t destroy us, the magic will.” He grinned sardonically. “You see what it has done to me. It ravaged Iventine, too. It changed him into what you know as the Nightmare. In time, it will do the same to Silwren.”

Rowen said, “Wait, I don’t understand...”

El’rash’lin sighed and faced Silwren. Rowen had the strange feeling that they were talking to each other, though neither of them made a sound. Then, El’rash’lin faced him again. “I will give you the answers you seek. But you may not like them.” He coughed. “Do you have the courage?”

Something in the sorcerer’s voice filled Rowen with fear. He looked at Silwren, trying in vain to interpret the veiled look in her eyes. Then, he gave El’rash’lin a nod.

El’rash’lin stood. The stooped figure stretched to full height, towering over Rowen. One twisted limb extended, bent fingers touching Rowen’s forehead. Rowen resisted the impulse to recoil from the cold of El’rash’lin’s touch. El’rash’lin closed his eyes, and a violet glow enveloped his body.

“Wait, what—”All around Rowen, the world collapsed.

Chapter Nineteen

The Wytchforest

O
ne by one, memories dissolved from him like dew beneath an oppressive wash of sunlight. All that he was fell away from him. He panicked, plummeting headlong into blackness. He tried to scream, but he had no voice.

Emptiness.

Then, slowly, new memories filled the void. They felt like his own: images of azure-eyed parents staring at him with revulsion; the taunts of other children with long, tapered ears; the lonesome solace of tree-shade, far from the others, deep in a forest so vast that the stars almost seemed nearer than the treetops.

This is the Wytchforest. My home.

A dim voice warned him that this could not be true—then that voice fell away. He had forgotten his own name. Then, he remembered. El’rash’lin. His name was El’rash’lin. He winced. The name meant “cursed one.”

Why am I cursed? What have I done? Why do they hate me?

In the forest again, alone, he ran as quickly as his young legs could take him. The trees alone understood him. Not safe even among his own family, at least he might be safe among the trees.

Twilight darkened the boughs, spreading a thick web of shadows through the undergrowth. He could not see the stars anymore. He lost his way. Then he found it. He ran harder… then slowed to a stop.

In the clearing ahead of him lay a pool—deep blue water, so unstirred that it might have been made of glass. Nervously, he drew closer. He saw reflections in the pool. The constellations, the moon, the foggy white swirl of Armahg’s Eye.

Then he saw himself: just a boy, slim faced, pale haired. What was so different about him? Then he saw his eyes—not azure like the others but purple, like the last moment of twilight before nightfall. Purple, like a bruise.

There’s something else...

He stirred. His heart leapt in his throat. Was this a trick of the water, the stars reflecting of its surface? The pupils of his eyes were white! He frowned.

Is that all? Is that really so terrible?

He must be missing something. He needed a better look. Instinctively, he raised one hand. A tingling heat kindled within him, starting at his chest, surging to his fingertips. Violet flames flared to life.

He screamed in panic. But the flames did not burn him. He stared—first horrified, then awed. The harmless tendrils coursed the length of his tiny arm, like serpents of purple light. He realized they must not be dangerous after all. He reached for the nearest tree and touched it.

Flames gushed from his fingertips as though something had been undammed within him. The fire wreathed the tree’s great trunk and spread higher and higher, swallowing the limbs. He screamed. He pulled his hand away—too late. His fire climbed as high as the heavens now. The tree shook and groaned, as though it were calling for help. El’rash’lin ran.

Years passed. He sensed that; sensed, too, that he’d been wounded. They were driving him away. Their thoughts conveyed the same raw hate as their yells. They hated him as much as they feared him. He told them they had no reason to be afraid. He would not hurt them, would not summon the magic they feared so much.

The Sylvs did not listen. They drove him out of the thick, ancient darkness of tree-shade, into the harsh strangeness of the world beyond. Nothing covered him but awful, empty sky. He wandered, half starved, alone and afraid. He came upon strangers—people with burly bodies and rounder faces, who spoke with words he sensed were not his own language though he understood them nonetheless.

He asked them for help. Most ran. Others hefted axes and tried to split him like a block of wood. He wanted to die, but something snapped. Something within him would not let them take his life. It roiled until he could no longer deny it. Finally, in despair, he fought back. He tried not to kill them, tried to soften the magic so that it would only scare them off, but the flames roared beyond his control. Screams echoed in his ears, driving him mad.

I will not fight... I will not kill...

He ran. They followed. In their naked, bestial thoughts, they blamed him for everything: failed crops, abrupt sickness, babies born cold as dead fish. He wanted to tell them their suffering was not his fault, that he did not hate them, that he was only different—not their enemy—but he knew they would not listen. Just as his own family had refused to listen. Finally, exhausted, he collapsed on the banks of a river. He waited to die.

But then
he
appeared: a giant of a man, big as an Olg but with almond eyes, angular Sylvan eyebrows, and a sharp jawline, fire flying from his hands. Tattoos covered him, head to foot. Before him, attackers scattered like so many cinders. Then, face lined with concern, the big man knelt to help him.

“Do not be afraid. You are safe now. I am like you. My name is Fadarah.”

He blinked in shock. “I am El’rash’lin...” His voice broke. Fadarah’s eyes were violet, like his own, the pupils white as starlight. “Are... are we demons?”

Fadarah smiled. “No, my friend. We are gods.”

So many saved now. So many more than they’d ever dreamed.

El’rash’lin watched them gather on the sun-washed plains, eyes filled with tears. Kith’el. Silwren. Iventine. Aerios. All of them—his new family. And Fadarah, their leader. So many. Surely they were safe now. No mob could harm them. They could go somewhere… live in peace.

They settled on the northernmost shore of Ruun, far from anyone. They built a village. They lived there for years before the Sylvs came. It was not enough that the Shel’ai had been driven from the Wytchforest. Sylvs now claimed that all the evils of the world could be traced back to them.

Horsemen, swords, great clouds of arrows.

The Shel’ai fended off wave after wave, violet flames burning the shadows of the dead into the scorched grass, but they just kept coming. Hundreds, then thousands. Finally, in despair, Fadarah ordered them to flee.

For weeks they ran, living like wild animals. They’d wisely targeted the Sylvan cavalry first, decimating them early in the fighting, hoping the footmen would give up. But the remainder of the Sylvan host pursued, only hours behind. Then, at last, the Sylvs grew weary of their own losses and gave up, returning to their own homeland. For them, it could not be called a victory because a handful of Shel’ai remained alive.

The Shel’ai did not celebrate. They wept. Some cried out for revenge. But Fadarah refused. He led them south instead. He told them to have hope. Perhaps Dwarrs were different. Reclusive, taciturn dwellers of hills and caverns, what did the Dwarrs care if the Shel’ai raised a new village in the unused fields? So the Shel’ai headed south, avoiding contact with Humans. They sought refuge in the snowy shadow of the Stillhammer Mountains, a safe distance from the city-fortress of Tarator.

But the Dwarrs answered with threats, and legions of armored men massed on the border. So the Shel’ai went north again. They decided to take their chances with the Humans—but their arrival in Ivairia coincided with the onset of famine and plague. Though the Shel’ai protested their innocence, even their attempts to use magic to ease the Humans’ suffering were rebuffed.

Some suggested they seek solace on the Lotus Isles. Others questioned the wisdom of this, doubting that the Humans there would be any different than the Humans in Ivairia.

“We will have no peace until all our enemies are crushed.” El’rash’lin heard himself speaking the words.

The others agreed—even Fadarah, the great man sitting alone by the fire, wearing in his expression the awful loneliness of the wilderness.

“Then we will crush them,” Fadarah said at last. “But to do this, we must become more than Shel’ai.” He rose to full height. “We must become what the Sylvs fear even more than they fear us. We must become the stuff of nightmares. We must become Dragonkin.”

El’rash’lin made the discovery. He read of the place in the famous Scrollhouse of Atheion, slipping unseen into the ancient, floating library in the dead of night. There, he scanned yellowed tomes written long before the Shattering War, until he found the legend: Namundvar, the Dragonkin.

On pages over a thousand years old, preserved by magic, the great, dying sorcerer had written how his kind defied the gods, leeching power from the gods’ favored creations: dragons. But the dragons had disappeared—dead or vanished, Namundvar would not say—and the Dragonkins’ power was waning. Some had even begun to mate with barbaric Humans and Dwarrs, spawning the first Sylvs.

The Sylvs multiplied. They had no magic of their own, but they overran half the Wytchforest through sheer numbers. Then, the Shel’ai—those Sylvs born with sorcery in their blood—began to appear at random. Nobody wanted them. The Sylvs did not trust magic, and the Dragonkin were disgusted that their power had been so diluted. Thus, they all fought each other.

Namundvar knew it was a war none could survive. So he called upon the last of his dying power to carve a breach through the heart of the world, through all that was, to tap directly into the Light.

Let all behold the spring from whence we came; let them know, at last, what unites us.

Namundvar’s Well. El’rash’lin pondered the legend. He dared to hope.
Might Namundvar’s dream still be realized? Could the endless wars that racked all the races be stopped somehow if people could be shown reason?
He shared the legend with Fadarah. The great man’s eyes filled with hope of a different sort. He embraced El’rash’lin like a brother. “You have done it,” he said. “We will draw fire and light from this Well. We will save our people!”

They gathered in the deepest secret sanctum of Cadavash—young and old, all the Shel’ai who remained. Four had volunteered: Silwren, Aerios, Cierrath, and Iventine. They stood fearfully in a circle near the Well, Fadarah just a few paces beyond them. In a moment, it would begin. It took only a little magic to unseal the Well, but it would take the combined might of all those assembled to steal from it.

El’rash’lin knew their plan. He knew every detail of Fadarah’s strategy. He knew because he had drafted much of it himself, long before. He wept. He had argued against this. But no one would listen.

So instead, without a word, he stepped toward the edge of the Well and joined the others. Fadarah’s eyes widened, wet with tears. But El’rash’lin was not doing this for Fadarah. The words of Namundvar’s legend echoed in his mind:
Let all behold the spring from whence we came...

All the Shel’ai ignited and combined the full sum of their powers. Violet light flooded the chamber, playing off ancient paintings. El’rash’lin’s eyes had been closed in concentration, but he opened them. He gazed into the Well. He expected to see peace, tranquility, even power. Instead, he saw the weight of his own mistake, surging up from the depths, so great that it crushed the breath from his lungs.