The next day began with a reheated pot of stew. Around a crackling fireplace, the Dragonslayers ate in silence. Moffe sat by the front window, peering into the snow-covered village as he ate. Halfway through his bowl, he sat upright. “Cora, come see this.”
Cora collapsed the Dareni chair and came to his side, and soon everyone hovered over the warden in solemn silence. The villagers were on the move. By twos and threes, they shuffled from their homes, dressed in thin rags, their legs plowing through the snow without care for the cold. Mouths hung open, and an occasional grating screech split the air like the anguished howl of a dying beast. She counted at least fifty, and they all filed together in the direction of Equine Hill.
Elric wiped his mouth on a sleeve. “What’s goin’ on?”
“It has begun,” Moffe muttered.
“What has?”
Cuauhtérroc cursed. “Dees people go to dees heel and dey weel die.”
“We need to stop them.” Cora shook her head. So obvious but so futile.
“I’m surprised Jangles isn’t leading them,” Moffe said. “We haven’t seen him in days, and that bothers me more than having to—Creation’s Maker!” The warden stood up suddenly and dropped his bowl.
Cora gasped. “They shot him!” The villager nearest the forest’s edge fell face down in the snow, his body littered with a dozen arrows. “They killed him!”
“They’re going to kill them all.” Moffe scrambled in a flurry of motion, pushing past the others to grab his coat and weapons. “Gear up,” he commanded. “If we don’t intervene, the Animithe will wipe them out.”
He threw open the door and ran in great leaping strides through the knee-deep snow, shouting across the village common in a language Cora couldn’t understand.
“Cripe!” she exclaimed as Cuauhtérroc raced after the warden.
Kiyla paused at the door to look back at Elric. A grin played at the corner of her mouth as she cracked a few vertebrae in her neck. “Try to keep up.” She bounded out the door.
Elric tossed an annoyed sigh after her. “It ain’t fair that her hands are weapons. I still gotta get mine.”
Cora cocked her head as Elric scooped up his purple velveteen sack. She scanned the mounds of debris. “Where’s your dragon armor?”
Elric’s eyes bugged as he vigorously shook his head. “I’m done with ‘at. It ain’t a good thang.”
Shouts and screeches clamored from across the village, diverting Cora’s attention. But Cuauhtérroc’s voice cut through with clarity, and he was calling her name.
“They need us,” she said. “Come on!”
Elric shook the sack and held out a hand. “Ya got a couple gold coins?”
“What? No, we have to go.”
“I need a weapon.”
Cora frowned at him. “Where’s your sword?”
“This always turns up sumpin way better. Well, usually. I jis need a couple o’ coins to activate it.”
Again, the savage bellowed her name.
“Look, I can’t wait around for you to explain it.” With a roll of her eyes, Cora handed him two stallions from her coin pouch. “Here. And hurry up.”
A brilliant blue sky and glistening snow dazzled her sight as she jump-ran through the snow to join the others. As she neared, the futility of their actions came into sharp focus.
Like trying to hold back a swelling river or a tumbling rock slide, nothing they did abated the people’s slow march to the forest. Cuauhtérroc and Kiyla corralled several villagers inside their arm spans, but their feet slid backwards in the snow as compulsion drove their captives onward. Moffe scurried around the plodding mass, slapping and shaking each in turn to wake them from their stupor. Pushing and turning them away altered their course by a few feet, but their vacant expressions remained set on Equine Hill, and they gave little heed to persuasion or force.
Cora knew a charmed person when she saw one, but this was something else. The unblinking eyes, gaping mouth, and lack of response to external stimuli meant these people were deep within a powerful thrall. A songsage certainly could create such an effect, but it was a power she had never before seen. With a good roll of the Bones, she might be able to unravel it. She had to try.
Slinging her lute into position, she strummed a series of chords, amplifying her voice above the din of struggle. Though stiff with cold, her fingers flew across the fretboard, and she warbled high, lofty notes. Her breath vaporized in mists, wafting into the wintry air and carrying the strains of magical music over the lumbering masses. She sang liberating lyrics, borne aloft by notes of freedom, filling the countryside with the echoes of deliverance. When the performance ended, a serene quiet settled over Elinwyche once more.
Elric shuffled up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m here.” In his hands he held a jagged black shortbow nocked with a single barbed arrow. Tiny crimson blots formed at his feet and trailed behind him, and an eager grin spread across his face.
For a moment, no one moved, until one of the villagers wriggled from Kiyla’s clutches and wandered away from the group. His mouth gaped open with hollow hunger as he shuffled into the woods.
In a flurry of wavering lines, a hail of arrows materialized from every direction and filled the man’s body with a rapid series of muted thuds. Several sailed over Kiyla’s shoulders and fluttered her hair with the precision of selective lethality. Her brown eyes flew open wide, and she lunged forward, taking her armload of villagers down with her into the snow.
Cora’s song had fallen on deaf ears. Heedless of the example set before them, the piteous people surged forward, squirming free of Cuauhtérroc’s clutches and sliding out from beneath Kiyla to resume their steady march.
Moffe spun and twisted, kicking snow in all directions. “Stop killing them!” The forest swallowed his shout in echoless silence. “Animithe!”
A voice responded from the trees, followed in quick succession by voices behind and before, left and right, each one speaking a single word but each word forming a sentence: “They must not ascend the hill.”
Cuauhtérroc ducked and swiveled at the voices emerging from every direction. Kiyla crawled back to her feet but remained crouched low and ready to spring. Cora put her lute away; it had proven useless against those whose minds were already gone.
Elric cursed under his breath. “That ain’t right.”
Moffe continued his frantic pacing, his bow raised and ready to strike. “Show yourselves! By Nature’s Maker, stop this slaughter. Let’s work together to end this evil.”
“We will not kill you,” the voices said, springing from all around, word-by-word. “We cannot end the evil, but we will end these lives before they become fuel for the furnace.”
“Fuel for the furnace?” Cora’s heart sank, weighed down by a millstone of dread.
“You can’t murder them!” the warden shouted into the surrounding air. “Help us stop this madness.”
“It cannot be stopped,” the collective voices responded, “except in death.”
Another villager escaped the cluster, and Moffe raced to stop the man’s progress, growling curses as he ran. He grabbed the man and shoved him back toward the larger group. A lone arrow sprang from the nearby trees, piercing Moffe’s collar just below his ear before lodging into the man’s neck. The warden recoiled in shock and thrust the man away. He shouted to the trees, “We will save them.”
He refocused on the struggling group. “We need some rope—lots of rope. Elric, run back to the—what the rink is that?”
“It’s my new bow.” Elric held it up with childlike glee. “Here’s hopin’ I don’ lose it this time.”
“Did you pull that out of your sack?” Cora asked.
“Yep.”
Moffe frowned at it. “It’s dripping with blood. Can you not sense the evil radiating off it?”
Elric lowered the weapon as his shoulders sagged. “Well, cripe. Hey, I ain’t got but the one arrow, so I’ll chunk it after that.”
“Good,” the warden said. “Now, run back to the house and gather all the rope from the stable. We’ll shield as many of these people as we can.”
Elric took off, and Moffe turned to the others. “Do everything you can to keep these people from entering the trees.”
Kiyla raised a pair of balled fists. “Everything?”
“Just don’t kill them.”
As the minutes passed, the ground became a soggy mixture of soil and snow as four dozen villagers steadily clamored for the trees and the hill that arose within. Bodies fell where Cuauhtérroc and Kiyla threw them, only to stand again and resume a persistent course, driven by an unseen force toward Equine Hill. Cora sang charming spellsongs, charm breakers, lullabies, and many other varieties, each a desperate attempt to crack the masonry wall in their heads. But the steady plodding of bare feet shuffled through the thickening soup of muddy snow, unimpeded by reason or charm.
“Why do dees people keep going?” Cuauhtérroc said with a groan. “I theenk dees female break dees leg, but she do not stop.”
A woman hobbled through the sludge despite a useless leg dislocated at the hip.
Cora sighed. “It’s like their minds have been wiped clean; I can’t charm what isn’t there.”
“Who has the power to do such a thing?” Moffe asked.
“Unfortunately…” Cora paused at length. “I think Jangles is a songsage. More powerful than—”
“I’m back!” Elric announced, running up with a coil of rope on each shoulder. He scanned the area with an upturned eyebrow. “Cripe, y’all done made a mess of this place. I did this to my yard one time, an’ Ma threw a hissy fit fer days.”
Moffe took one of the rope coils. “That’s enough commentary. Help us bind them against these trees.”
Once they had roped the masses to the trees, each one bound tightly to the next and stacked like vertical cordwood against the trunks, Moffe stepped away and yelled into the muted woods. “Leave them alone, you Animithe!”
Cora’s heart ached for them. Men, women, and even a few surviving children strained with feeble effort against their bindings, compelled by an impulse they could not understand and she could not dispel. Malnourished bodies staggered under their own weight, driven mad by the control of a heartless songsage. If that’s what he was.
“We go now,” Cuauhtérroc said, resting a hand on her shoulder.
“I don’t think they’re going to make it,” Cora replied with a shaky voice. Five bodies lay lifeless in the muddy snow, but only two were victims of Animithe arrows. “I fear they’ll all die soon.”
“Come,” the savage said. “We go find dees Jangles.” He pulled his longsword from the sheath. “Den we see what happen.”
They trudged through the snow toward Equine Hill. Cora’s thoughts never strayed far from the people they had tied together, but as they reached the clearing surrounding the hillock, there were new worries crowding in. They alone stood between the unholy shrine and the destruction of an entire village, whose population had already been reduced to a few dozen ravenous shells. Maybe the Animithe have the right idea… It was a horrid thought, but the alternative looked increasingly more like rote existence in a mindless state.
They fanned out, searching the tree line near the clearing, but the forest was vacant. No sounds, no footprints, and no Jangles. Moffe grumbled under his breath as he paced along the base of the hill. “He should be here. Jangles should be here calling for them.”
He whistled a brief trill and held out his arm. A red-shouldered hawk glided silently in and landed near his elbow before hopping close to his ear. The warden conversed with his bird for a moment before sending it off again. “If Jangles is here, Clement will find him.”
Wide eyes and a happy grin illumined Elric’s face as he stared at the warden. “That…is ‘at yer…animal…friend? Like Ordin had his Shinnick an’ I had Isaac? Did you call him in from the Maker’s Realms? Can he talk?”
Cora cleared her throat. “Elric…”
He sighed. “Yes, ma’am.”
Cora gazed skyward. Clement had flown out of sight, but something else had caught her eye, and it melted her resolve. “It’s getting darker.” Though it was not yet midday, the earlier brilliance was muted, as if the sun had weakened even as it peaked. She shuddered as goosebumps scattered across her arms. “And colder.”
“Odhasaim.” Moffe spat into the snow. “The Void approaches. It will be completely dark soon.”
“Say what?” Elric said with a nervous chuckle. “It ain’t even noon yet.”
“The sun will be blotted from the sky.”
Cuauhtérroc’s dark eyes narrowed. “Dees is very bad.”
Cora tried to stand taller beneath the weight of that gloomy declaration. “I’ve seen nineteen years, Moffe, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
The warden’s shoulders heaved under a heavy sigh, but he nodded. “It happens every year, but the effects are more pronounced in different places. This year, we fall in shadow, as will the Cerion Forest. But the Brack and parts of Arvoria will endure the cursed ‘midnight at noon.’ The rest of the world will never know it happened.”
Kiyla snapped a twig off a nearby tree. “Good thing we ain’t in the Brack.”
“Listen.” Moffe held up a hand, demanding silence.
“I hear it,” Cora whispered. A low humming, distant and indistinct, floated in from the trees, a single note that slowly grew in volume and proximity. Cora turned to face the forest, drawn by the sonorous undercurrent. But as the sound neared, the timbre shifted, rising in pitch to a full-throated wail. Those around her cringed and covered their ears, but Cora’s teeth clenched and vibrated with the frequency. The wailing escalated to a piercing screech, thrashing the wooded area with an aural cacophony. Trees threw snow off their branches, pummeling the Dragonslayers with clouds of white.
Jangles approached from deep within the woods, his mouth impossibly wide with the ongoing scream. Cora fought through the waves of sound to formulate a simple thought. I have to cancel that sound. Lysanthir’s Lute vibrated in her hands, and she did the only thing she could. Forming a chord of power with her left hand, she strummed with great rhythmic energy on the strings while singing a scale of notes at the top of her voice.
The air shredded around them, and Jangles closed his mouth. A sudden silence returned to the forest, and Jangles walked into their midst and bowed low with his arms held wide to either side. “Well played, my dear.”
Behind him, now visible beyond his stooped figure, the citizens of Elinwyche slowly ambled toward them.
“You…” Cora’s words caught in her throat. “You freed them!”
Jangles’ head bobbed in a half-nod as he shrugged. “Well, in the smallest possible way, yes.”
“What of the Animithe?” Moffe asked, pulling himself upright.
A smirk pulled at Jangles’ lips. “They generally run away from me, which is a pity. They should get to know me better.”
Moffe raised his bow. “I think we know all we need to.”
Jangles looked back at the advancing horde. “But most of them chose to stick around this time.”
The warden’s eyes widened as he lowered his bow.
Cora’s hand flew to her mouth to hide a gasp.
Intermingling with the emaciated villagers, dozens of healthy Vashanti advanced with unblinking eyes and gaping mouths. Many were clad with thick furs, and all wore lengthy hair intricately tied with beaded leather cords. Faces stained in hues of green, black, and brown looked on without emotion. Each of them carried a loaded bow and a full quiver.
Moffe raised his bow and released his arrow into Jangles’ chest.
It passed clean through him but left no trace of a wound.
A villager behind him fell with the arrow in his lung.
“Not your best move.” Jangles’ words dripped with scorn. He turned to the mixed group of nearly a hundred souls. “Goodbye, my loves. I think perhaps I may never see you again. Where I am going you cannot follow. Believe me, it’s best if you never think of me again…not that you have thoughts anyway, but in case you do, don’t think of me.” With a sweep of his hands, he directed them to the base of Equine Hill. “Up you go.”
“Why?” Cora screamed. “Why are you doing this?” They had struggled to stop forty previously; holding off a hundred now, the extras at full vitality, seemed impossible. “What can you possibly gain?”
Jangles ran fingers through his long crown of gray hair. “What could I say that wouldn’t curl your toenails?”
“Songsages don’t do things like this.”
“My dear.” Jangles spun and swept forward to Cora’s side with more alacrity than snow normally allowed. “My sweet, innocent, naïve, foolish, ignorant Clara.”
“Her name’s Cora!” Elric barked.
Jangles bounced an eyebrow and traced a finger down Cora’s cheek. “I’m not a songsage.” He vanished, leaving a puff of snow floating along the ground.
The Dragonslayers collapsed a tight circle around Cora as she trembled with a chill that touched her heart.
“You held yourself valiantly,” Moffe replied.
Elric cursed and spat on the ground. “That there’s a evil man. I seen it, like shinies comin’ off the sun, only it was more like darkies comin’ off the moon, if ‘at makes any sense.”
“Dees is bad juju,” Cuauhtérroc muttered. “We cannot stop dees people. Dey are more and stronger now.”
Several dozen Animithe in the nearing crowd raised their bows, and a cloud of arrows sailed across the woods.
Cora’s allies scampered, but she froze.
“Run, Cora!” Elric cried. “Get outta there!”
“Cora O’Banion!” Cuauhtérroc’s voice boomed.
Her legs refused to move. A swarm of arrows bore down on her. The ring on her left hand shimmered and thrummed. Maybe that would protect her, but the others had no such hope.
She closed her eyes, filled her lungs, and shouted. A wave of visible sonic energy spread from her mouth, scooping snow before it like a plow and piling it up in a roll. Sprays of white flakes fanned out in a cone before her. Tree limbs quivered and quaked. The airborne missiles ricocheted off the sweeping pulse of sound as if striking a stone wall. Moments later, the amassed snow rolled to a stop, settling into an embankment in front of the archers.
Two deep ruts dug through the snowy ground where Cora’s feet failed to brace against the recoil. Several yards away, she lay against a boulder that had tripped and toppled her.
Elric rushed to her side. “That was rinkin awesome!” he shouted. “When’d you learn to do that?”
“There’s no time to elaborate,” Moffe said. “Jangles has returned.” He nocked another arrow and sighted in his target.
“You know what they say about insanity,” Jangles said with a clack of his tongue.
“It drives men to the deepest of evils?” Moffe seethed as he pulled back his bowstring.
“No, no…it’s thinking, beyond all rational thought, that somehow by sheer force of willpower you could possibly hit me with that arrow. I’ve seen better sense in a toddling child.”
“Try this one,” Elric said. The cruelly barbed bow dribbled red at his feet, and his one arrow hummed on the taut string. He opened his fingers and let the missile fly.
A single eyebrow raised on Jangles’ face, topping a look of impatient contempt. But the arrow lodged into his chest, and he staggered back a step, both eyebrows now raised.
A second arrow appeared on Elric’s bowstring with a faint crackle. Elric sniggered.
“Stop!” Jangles shouted. “I’ll give you what you want. I’ll give you everything!”
Cuauhtérroc stormed toward him with sword upraised. “No, we keel you now.”
“Don’t you want to save the people?” Jangles pleaded. “Kill me and they all die.”
“Cuauhtérroc, wait!” Cora scrambled to her feet. “Elric, keep that…hideous bow trained on him.”
She strode forward, an angry finger pointed at Jangles. “We now know we can kill you, so you will do exactly as we say. One: call off your archers. Two: let the people go. Three: explain yourself.”
Jangles grimaced toward the sky. “Okay, no, and follow me.”
“Not happening,” Moffe said.
“I don’t mean follow me like everyone else does.” Jangles huffed and turned around. “I mean literally follow me—in the normal way. You want answers? I need to show you something.”
“Just tell us,” Cora demanded. “And quickly.”
“Really, hon…I need to show you. I’d say ‘trust me,’ but that would be pointless, wouldn’t it? So, don’t trust me; shoot me down, lose all the people, and never know what it all meant or what you could have done about it.”
After a pause, Cora nodded.
With Elric’s arrow prodding him in the back, Jangles led the Dragonslayers on a sweeping curve around the perimeter of Equine Hill. The sky darkened as the sun’s light continued to dim. Twisted shadows crept along the ground—unnatural mockeries of the things they represented.
“How dark will it get?” Cora asked aloud.
Jangles flashed her a grin as twisted as the shadows. “Literally or metaphorically?”
Cora frowned. “I think I know.”
Minutes later, Jangles stopped behind a cluster of wispy birches and pointed. “Your answers are within reach.”
Cora’s stomach turned. “What’s that smell?”
Jangles stepped through the birches to the edge of an overgrown tarn lined with reed, cattails, and other swampy flora, most of which was wilted and covered with an inky red-gray fungus. Murky water filled the tarn with the unpleasant color of diluted blood. The foul odor of decayed mud and swamp gas rose from the surface, in places creating visibly stagnant and rotten vapors. Noticeably absent was any sign of pond life—no ripples in the water from fish or frogs, no buzzing insects, and no turtles poking their heads above the surface.
Death was everywhere. Wretched creatures from the forest, clawing their way to the henge above, had slipped and fallen into the cesspool below, where they had drowned in the putrid waters. Half-dissolved bodies, their wormy entrails spilled in a wake of slime, tried in vain to find escape from the torturous tarn.
On the other side, a rocky outcropping, stained with rivulets of dried blood, jutted abruptly from the ground, crowned by the looming granite stones of an unholy henge surrounding a stone table. Half-carved into the rocks and painted in blue, the crude image of a four-legged creature spread across the rocky surface and gave the knoll its name.
“Equine Hill’s backside,” Moffe said with sobriety.
“You don’t have to be so crass about it,” Jangles quipped. “Also, there’s nothing really equine about it. It’s more draconic, don’t you think?”
“Of course it’s equine. It’s the burial site of an entire cavalry that—”
“Vaero’s heart!” Jangles exclaimed with a loud chuckle. “Do you still believe that lie? This is a burial mound, to be sure, but not for some pile of horses nobody can remember.”
The closer Cora peered at the image on the rocky cliff, the more it became clear. That’s not a horse; that’s a dragon!
Jangles provided Cora with an especially cruel sneer. “And when we’re done here, it won’t be a burial ground anymore.”
In a fit of anger, Moffe pulled his shortsword, grabbed a handful of Jangles’ clothing, and plunged his blade into the man’s stomach. “That settles it! You are guilty of the deaths of a thousand forest creatures and the enslavement of the people of Elinwyche. And you have desecrated this site with your dark necromancies.”
Whether Jangles’ dull gray eyes registered fear, shock, or mirth, Cora could not tell. An unnerving scream erupted nearby, and Moffe yanked his sword from Jangles’ belly as he spun about.
“Right on time,” Jangles said, his eyes gleaming.
A procession of people trudged along the top of the hill, each one passing between the menhir. A ragged villager laid down atop the table, emitted a piercing screech of pure agony, and dissolved into liquid runoff.
Cora’s knees buckled, and she dropped onto the snowy ground.
Kiyla cursed, but even her choicest words were insufficient.
A third villager reached the table and laid down, filling the air with a most wretched sound.
“Make it stop!” Cora cried, covering her ears.
“Go to the Nine Hells!” Elric roared. He launched an arrow from his bloody bow.
“Been there,” Jangles said, taking the arrow fully in his chest. “Whoa…that smarts.”
“An’ I got more,” Elric shouted, stepping forward as another arrow materialized on his string. “Lots more.”
Moffe thrust his sword into Jangles’ stomach again.
“You really are insane,” Jangles said in mocking tones to the warden. “And you…” He pointed to Elric. “You can’t hit what you can’t see.” He vanished, leaving behind a greenish-yellow cloud of foul-smelling fumes.
“What in the—” Moffe’s words choked off as the cloud wafted over him. He doubled over, grasping at his throat, and fell to his knees in a fit of uncontrollable coughing.
“Dere he is!” Cuauhtérroc pointed to a nearby willow, then gave chase, filling the area with a primal war cry. Kiyla followed closely on his heels.
Jangles pointed and emitted a grating screech, and Kiyla’s body froze stiff. She toppled over face first into the snow and plowed a furrow through the white blanket with her forehead.
Cuauhtérroc surged forward and leaped, holding his longsword aloft. In midair, he yelled an arcane word, and the sword flashed with coruscating blue energy that bathed his surroundings in an icy azure hue.
Jangles rolled aside just as Cuauhtérroc landed in his space. The longsword swiped through empty air and lodged deep in the willow. Without a moment’s hesitation, Cuauhtérroc drove his shoulder into the tree. Bark crumbled away from the impact, the tree tilted, and the air resounded with a thunderous crack as its dry fibers split and the trunk gave way to savage fury, sending a shower of bark, twigs, and snow in all directions.
At the twisted stump, Cuauhtérroc removed his sword and glared at Jangles. “Now you beg for dees life!”
Jangles laughed. “If you can see me doing that, you can see the future of a thousand years.”
Yet another screeching wail split the air as another sacrifice laid down across the unholy altar.
“Elric,” Cora moaned through rising grief, “please make it stop. I can’t…I can’t take this anymore.”
“So, scream at him, Cora.”
“I can’t move. Each soul that cries out presses me further into the ground.”
“Cripe, Cora. That don’t make no sense. But I can fill that old songsage with arrows if ya want.”
“He’s not a songsage,” Cora groaned. “But please…for the love of Beauty, kill him.”
Elric stood, sighted in his target, and drove a third arrow into Jangles’ chest.
“Will you cut that out?” Jangles shouted. “How am I supposed to concentrate on—”
Elric shot a fourth, but Jangles vanished again. In the fading sunlight of a Void-occluded day, he reappeared atop one of the stone menhirs on Equine Hill, silhouetted against the backdrop of cloudless gray. His voice rang out clear and loud. “I bid you all good day; it’s time for me to go. Thank you for not killing me. That was sort of necessary. You’ve been too kind, all told. And more than a bit naïve, which always helps.”
Jangles clutched his chest, as if he might be trying to wrest the arrows from his body. As another soul dissolved beneath him, Jangles tore at his flesh, screeching aloud as his shadowed form changed shape and size. With alarming rapidity, multiple horns spouted from his skull as his jaw distended and hung to his chest. His neck stretched and thinned as wings sprouted from his back.
“Cora,” Elric said, “can you sing me a light? I gotta see this.”
Light. The first thing a songsage learns, a fundamental spellsong mastered before anything else. A simple task, even under duress. Yet, Cora struggled to find both the willpower and the notes. She waffled, she warbled, but she finally produced a glowing mote.
Elric held his bow to her. “Put it on my arrow.” He held the lighted shaft up and trained his sights on Jangles. “Die already.”
The arrow sailed up and over Equine Hill. Radiance from Cora’s light spread before it, revealing not a man but a hideous and nightmarish creature. Skin mottled in reddish-purple, eyes aflame with deep red hues, wings of leathery membranes. With a taloned claw, it grabbed Elric’s arrow from the air and crushed it into splinters. The creature spread its dark wings, took to the skies, and flew away.
The air reverberated with the loss of another life.
“Sonuvacrap!” Elric exclaimed. “That was s’posed to kill ‘im!” He threw down the bow and took off toward the hill. “Get back here, ya coward!”
A doleful moan escaped Cora’s lips. She needed to warn him of the stones, but a weak, ineffective sound was all that dribbled from her exhausted lips.
Elric rushed onward, climbing the hill when he could no longer run up its slope.
Behind her, Cuauhtérroc went on a destructive rampage, chopping tree limbs with wild abandon. Moffe choked and sputtered to clear the poisoned gas from his lungs. Kiyla remained face down in the snow. It was an utter and devastating loss, and Cora wilted beneath the weight of it. Soon Elric would succumb to the power of the unholy henge, transform into an undead creature, and join the procession of villagers and Animithe to a liquid death. Even now, the rocks bled with the vestiges of the people’s bodies.
Elric reached the summit. He pushed past the procession and grabbed the lead person—an Animithe—just as he was about to lie atop the table. With the area cleared, he laid his hands on the table’s edge.
Everything inside Cora wanted to scream out at him, but it was hopeless. They had lost and that was that. This was the end.
With a mighty grunt, Elric lifted the stone top, and, standing under one edge, he shoved it up and off its pedestals. The tablet thudded atop the snowy ground and skidded down the slope with a quarter-turn, where it slid off the rocky ledge and crashed into the murky tarn. Waves of fetid water splashed against the side of the hill and sent a small tide surging across its surface.
With the force of a thunderclap, Cora’s mind cleared. Her heart lifted with song, and she burst forth into a spontaneous shout of joy. The darkness pressing her down was gone, but a different sense of gloom clouded her thoughts.
Elric had touched the stone. He had sacrificed himself, perhaps unknowingly. It was a heroic, effective, dangerous, stupid thing to do. So quickly after returning to life, he was gone again. It would be forever this time. There was no coming back from the undead.
Behind her, Kiyla sat up and sputtered. “Why was I sleepin’ in the snow?”
Cora regarded her with an aching heart. How can I tell her Elric’s dead again? Her mind spun with a dozen possible ways to explain it, but all avenues ended in stone walls.
Heavy coughing near the tree line diverted her. Moffe remained on his knees, and he struggled to breathe or speak. With eyes widened by distress, a feeble “help” escaped into the air as he fell over, clutching his throat and thrashing on the ground.
Cora raced to his side and threw off her pack. He’s suffocating! She dumped out the contents of her pack into the snow and grabbed up all the analeptics she had—five vials. The first poured easily into a mouth gasping for air, but the warden choked and spewed the life-giving elixir across Cora’s lap. A second followed, and Moffe swallowed. His body relaxed, his eyes closed, and he breathed once more. She placed a third vial in his hand. “Stay with us. I’ll go retrieve Cuauhtérroc from his rampage.”
With a forlorn glance at the unholy henge, Cora stopped and trembled. Elric was gone, as was the procession of villagers and Animithe scattered across the top of Equine Hill.
She dashed through the forest, following Cuauhtérroc’s chaotic trail of rage and destruction. Most every tree along the path was missing limbs, as if the arbor represented an army in the savage mind. Several smaller trees had been sheared off at waist height and lay atop the snowy ground. Deeper into the forest, the panther warrior leaned against the trunk of a massive cedar, hands on knees and heaving deep vaporous breaths. Above him, his longsword was buried halfway through the cedar’s trunk.
He looked up with smoldering eyes as Cora approached.
Any other time, Cora would have laughed at him, called him a lunk, and told him it served him right for storming off in a blinding rage. But Elric was either gone or dead. Or worse.
“Moffe has a hatchet,” she said. “We’ll come back for it. Right now, you need to calm down, my friend. We’re not done here, and we need you. Your macana will do fine.”
When she returned to Moffe at the tree line, he stood with Kiyla, leaning on her for support. Both were peering into the trees along the base of the hillock. Many footsteps crunched through the snow, and filling the air like an angelic chorus were the sounds of rejoicing and thanksgiving. Soon, the crowd came into view—Elric leading nearly forty Animithe stripped of all clothing.
“I swear I didn’t tell ‘em to do this.” Elric gestured behind him and refused to look over his shoulder. “It ain’t decent.”
A fit of coughing erupted in Moffe’s throat, but a broad grin suggested he had intended to laugh.
Cora’s heart leapt in her chest. How could he possibly still be alive?
But Kiyla took a more direct approach, charging into him for a lengthy embrace.
Cora glanced around at the unclothed people. “Um…why? Can you not put your clothes back on?”
An older wild Vashanti stepped forward, his bare skin painted in variegated earthtones. “It is our custom to become one with Nature after a great victory.”
Cuauhtérroc nodded. “It is like dees in my homeland.”
“Also, the villagers need our coats. They are soon to die without dedicated care, which our people are giving.” The Vashanti indicated Elric with an open hand. “This man saved our lives. We now turn our bows outward as a hedge of protection for these people, and we will administer health and life-giving sustenance. If it were not for Moffe, your warden guide, this town surely would have fallen. We are in your service.”
Moffe nodded, but his voice rasped unintelligible words.
The elder Vashanti nodded to a woman near him, who approached Moffe and laid her hands on his throat. Her lips mouthed unspoken syllables, and beneath her hands, a pale-yellow glow limned her skin.
Moffe closed his eyes and relaxed beneath her touch. “Thank you,” he said clearly when she had backed away. “I will tell the Cerion of your good deeds. They will know that Elinwyche is suffering but is in good hands. I’ll send Clement to them with a message for aid, and they’ll provide what supplies you need to defend yourselves and survive the winter.”
“The elder’s home is filled with things he took,” Cora said, “and his larder is filled with food. Take what you need to restart their families. We don’t know if Jangles will return. We do know he’s not a songsage, or even a man. I think what we saw was a jinadaar.”
“That’s not possible.” The Vashanti’s brow deepened into a worried scowl. “They are creatures of the Abyss, spawns of the Great Dragon herself. They cannot be here. That would mean…” His voice squelched in a deluge of dread.
Cora searched her memories for studies she never thought she’d need. “I don’t know what it means, but we just saw a man transform into a giant winged creature with horns and talons. It was not a dragonkin; his visage matched that of Abyssal lore. He induced a mindless stupor upon a hundred people and led them to a procession of horrific sacrifice. Those are the actions of unthinkable evil and fitting for an Abyssal creature.”
She cast a final look at the menhirs atop Equine Hill. “Whatever he was, he walked among us, and we had no idea.”
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