The druidess whipped her attention towards him, alerted by the light of his corona, or some preternatural sense granted by the empowerment of the ritual.She swept her flowering staff.Lightning burned from its tip and lashed out, carving the air.He ducked, hurled justice outwards to meet her blow, grunted as the weight of the clash ripped through his body.It would come to a duel, then.The virtue of the Mortal Church against these heathen magics, borrowed from the First Folk, strengthened by depravity.
‘You see, Anakriarch?’Medrith cried, her voice carrying on the conjured winds.‘We had no need of you.Parwys is a kingdom unto itself, carved out in ancient days, its powers as deep as the roots of its forests and mountains!As vast as its seas, as swift as its rivers!They were sleeping for want of a king.Now they wake.Soon, I will pour them through this fae monster.The ghosts will lose their anchor, and fade, and there will be peace again!And then we will sweep aside your crusade, crush your puppets in Afondir and Alberon!’
Her laughter pealed like thunder.A bowshot sounded, and her voice turned to a snarl.No lightning, this time, but a bullet of her own wind tore from her outstretched hand and through the storm.Torin glimpsed the hulking mercenary and saw a spurt of blood wet the whirling sand.Here was his chance.
Justice was his.All he did, he did in its name.All the pain he inflicted, all the lives he had claimed.Even the confusion that tormented him he carried for the sake of justice, his mind always open to the slim possibility that he might be wrong, to evidence that might turn his knife at the last, fatal moment.Always tempered by compassion for the suffering of his victims.It made him effective, cognisant of precisely how much pain to inflict to extract what was necessary, and no more.
It had made him vulnerable, too.Doubt had crept in, and now threatened to drown his faith, and leave him a shell of himself.Lacking purpose.All his virtues turned to vicious flaws.
Unless he could seize that tree-devil and pry from her an answer to buttress his collapsing certainty and purpose.
His hands became claws of fire, unimpeded by the haze, unhindered by the wind, reaching for Medrith’s throat.
He would have had her, the virtues of the Mortal Church cleaving through the thin defences of heathen magic.
A scream unfurled from the altar.Force rolled behind it, striking Torin like a cudgel and knocking him to the ground.He managed to lift his head in time to see Prince Owyn ready a second blow.An aurora of sunlight and fire burned from the head of the hammer as it fell.The altar, already cracked, now shattered.
The power the First Folk had woven to create this tower, the space within it and the weapon in the prince’s hand snapped, like the mast line of a sailing ship held taut and suddenly freed.
‘Everyone get out!’a voice cried—the sorceress Fola, standing by the shattered altar, visible now that her conjured storm had died in the wake of the power the prince had unleashed.Taking her own advice, she seized the prince and Ifan—freed and on his feet at her side—and bolted towards the tunnel that burrowed through the eerily distant walls.Walls that now bowed inwards, as though they bore more weight than they could carry.
Cracks the brilliant white of a forge’s heart appeared in the walls, but cast no light.The musty, earthen smell that permeated the place became choked with rot.A darkness like the space between the stars settled around Torin.The curving runes in the faces of the Old Stones, which had glowed with the magic of Medrith’s ritual, faded away.The furious brilliance that had poured from the leaves of the queen’s staff, too, went out like a snuffed candle.By the last of their glow he saw the druidess’s eyes go wide with terror, and the tree-devil woman behind her, wrapped in chains.
The air became thick with sudden pressure, as though great, invisible hands had seized them all and begun to squeeze.Rolls like thunder heralded something huge and vast that fell from high overhead, collided with and shattered one of the Old Stones.Then another, landing closer, shook the ground and sent Torin to his knees.A fragment of it struck Medrith.She made no sound but the splintering of her bones.
No time to seize the tree-devil and spring for the exit.Torin called out for Anwe, but she did not call back.Crushed, perhaps, by the collapsing tower.
He would not die here, buried with these heathens in the grave they made of their own dark powers.Desperate, he cast about for the tree-devil and threw himself at her.She snarled, but he held her down, her strength dampened by raw iron, his bolstered by the virtue of honour.He threw his body across hers and opened his hands wide, hurling justice upwards.Fragments of the walls and ceiling—something like stone, but with the grain of wood, and leaking a mist that seemed to devour light—crashed down and shattered against his dome of silver flames.Each impact rattled his joints and threatened to splinter the bones of his arms, his back, his chest.
From high overhead came a sound that blurred in his ears, baffling all his senses, plunging him into a sudden madness that stretched on and on as the tower fell and the impossible space within it unravelled.He screamed for Anwe, for Orn, for his mother, weeping and laughing as he held to justice as tightly as he was able, trusting in it to carry him through the maddening chaos.
Silence at last descended.It filled the space left by the last of his screams.Absolute darkness surrounded him.He thought, perhaps, that this was death.Not what he had expected.Nor what he had been taught.But so little was as he had been taught, he was coming to discover.Rather than an extinguishing of his mind, it seemed that he lingered.Perhaps he had become the latest ghost to haunt this cursed land.
A terrible thought.One that made him cackle, his voice falling muted against the rubble he held back by the force of his virtue.That wall of flickering silver alone told him that he still lived.That, and the twisting and snarling of the tree-devil beneath him, the links of the chain that bound her digging into the flesh and bone of his back.
The rubble shifted.There was a muffled grunt, then a shout.‘Torin!’
Anwe, somehow alive and unburied.He cried out, and summoned what strength he had left to push against the mountain above him.There was a trickle of black, brackish dust, but that was all.Until a slab of the strange material was heaved upwards and away, revealing a hulking, bloodied silhouette.
At first he panicked, fearing it was the mercenary beholden to the sorceress, until he saw the flickering crown of flame.Anwe heaved a sigh—of relief, or reshouldering the burden of his leadership—and reached down to him.He let justice fade, took her hand, and let himself be pulled into the light.
‘And the tree-devil,’ he insisted, his voice cracked and withered.
Anwe glowered at him, but lowered herself into the hole she had made and seized the tree-devil by her iron chains.Grunting, fresh blood trickling from a thousand small lacerations, Anwe heaved the woman and the weight of raw iron that bound her up and out of the rubble.As she did so, Torin took in what had become of the green tower and Bryngodre.
The branches of the vast oak had fallen to earth, shattered as though by a terrible wind.Houses, the inn and countless tents had been crushed in their collapse.The hill on which Bryngodre stood was gouged and pitted.People wailed at the night-time sky draped in black clouds, in shock, in pain, in grief.The trunk of the tree had broken and collapsed into strange, blackened slabs.Some had fallen inwards, onto Torin, but others had exploded outwards, hurling fragments of the tree and blocks of stone dozens of paces.They were a simple slate grey now, no longer green and mottled with unsettling, moving shadows.
There was no sign of the slain druidess and her companions, nor Prince Owyn, the Count of Glascoed, the sorceress Fola or her hulking mercenary.With luck, they would have all been buried in the destruction of the tower.A dark thought, undeserving of an anakriarch.Still, he chuckled to himself.In his madness, or desperation, or whatever emotion had driven him to such a self-annihilating impulse, the prince had paved the way for Torin.
‘Get her on her feet,’ he told Anwe.‘We should be gone from here, back to Afondir and Templar Unwith.’
Anwe settled on a slab of rubble and grunted.
‘Anwe,’ Torin pressed.‘We cannot linger.’
The Knight of Action regarded Torin with a slow, measured stare.She gestured to the blood seeping down her flanks.‘If I start dragging the bitch now, I’ll bleed out.Give me a bloody moment to recover.’
A unfamiliar shock pulsed through Torin.Insubordination was unthinkable, and Anwe had resisted him now not once, but twice.Disobedience to an anakriarch, and her ordained commander, flew in the face of Anwe’s virtue of honour.She risked the loss of the Agion’s gifts by this.
