‘Very well,’ Torin said, unsure what else to say.He studied Anwe’s wounds more closely.It was difficult to gauge their severity, given what he had witnessed her endure before.Her corona yet burned with the virtue of industry, which sped the healing of her body, and still she bled.
If she died, he would be stranded.For all his skill, all his virtues, all his determination, he lacked the physical brawn to drag a woman draped in chains across Parwys.There was little hope of prying the answers he needed from the tree-devil here, where he, an outsider and representative of a rival religion, would surely become the target of the grief and wrath of the people who survived in Bryngodre.
He knelt beside Anwe, partly from compassion, partly from desperate need, and placed a hand on her flank where the bleeding seemed worst.‘By Beren, Agion of Fidelity,’ he murmured, and felt some of her pain and weariness wash into him.Better that they share the burden of her wounds, he reasoned, though his mind slowed and blurred and his body sagged beneath deepening fatigue.
When he had taken all the suffering from Anwe that he could, he stood, steadying himself on a piece of rubble.‘We have to move,’ he said, his voice thick, the words slow in coming.‘Can you stand?’
She murmured, but did not move.Torin looked out over the wreckage of the town and watched bedraggled, wounded people pick their way by torchlight around fallen branches that sprawled like the limbs of some slain, mutilated god.Perhaps from this they would learn the folly of their hubris.No matter how potent the cast-offs of the First Folk, no matter how useful they seemed, using them to compensate for mortalkind’s weakness and viciousness would always end thus.In misuse.In a facade of power collapsing into misery and death.
A startling thought arose from the miasma of his pain and fatigue.His own powers—the cleansing ritual that ought to have burned away the evils that clung like cobwebs to Parwys—had collapsed just the same.These heathens had believed in their tree, their altar, their tower, their stones as fervently as he believed in the virtues and the Agion.Which had failed him, defying all he had been taught, all he had understood.
There were many powers in the world, it seemed to him then.As many as there were minds to build them up, and use them, and see them fail.True power lay in the delusional step after such a failure.The continued belief in a doctrine proven false, or flawed.In crowning a king while the forest boiled with rebellion.In rebuilding a fallen tower, replanting a shattered tree.Burying a bloodstained past, like a king’s blade in his barrow.
Incoherent thoughts.Musings, he told himself, trying to quiet them though they roared louder and louder in his aching brain.He had wielded justice, hadn’t he, to hold back the rain of debris?Had, by fidelity, taken some of Anwe’s pain.The power of the Agion was true, and real.The evidence of it lay in the world and in his memory—in his very life, which would have ended long ago without it.He simply did not understand it.Perhaps no one, truly, understood the weave of powers in the world.
Yet those maddening thoughts refused to leave him.He would not succumb, not accept them, no matter how they twisted his stomach and agonised his soul.They had become a terrible pain, one he could only relieve by the answers that lay within the tree-devil’s mind.He turned away from the ruin and back to Anwe and the tree-devil, ready to prod them to departure.Behind them, atop the crushed remnant of the red brick tunnel that had once bridged the wider world and the smaller one within the green tower, stood the sorceress Fola, bloodied and battered herself, with a book in one hand and a pen in the other.
Freedom
YC 1189
The City provides shelter, sustenance and security, without cost and without mortal effort.What, then, can be of value to us?
Archivist Saro,Pontifications,YC23
The tower began to break while Fola half-dragged Ifan and pushed Owyn ahead of her through the tunnel.The prince cackled quietly, still clutching Abal’s Hammer to his chest.The ground leapt beneath their feet.A rumble like thunder chased their heels, punctuated by sharp cracks and the scream of metal tearing.They burst through the doorway as one of the great oak’s branches fell, like the arm of some fae giant reaching down to crush Bryngodre.
Fola herded Owyn and Ifan away from the tower and into an empty stable.Ifan collapsed onto a pile of straw, his bruise-mottled head bobbing on the edge of unconsciousness.Medrith’s guards and Owyn’s housecarls had not been kind to their captive traitor, and Ifan had spent the last of his strength in his effort to save Owyn.Fola kept a worried eye on him while she scrawled a hasty spell on the support beams of the stable and the wall that faced the collapsing tower.Owyn pressed himself to that wall and set one of his wide, wild eyes to a knothole.His mouth hung open, his lower lip quivered, the corners turned up in a manic smile.
‘This’ll put an end to it,’ he murmured to himself.He pressed his empty hand to his ear and his expression twisted into anguish.‘I’ll have quiet, at last.’
Fola did not have time to unravel the prince’s madness.The gwyddien woman was still inside that tower, as were—to her knowledge—Colm and Frog.Thoughts swirled through her on a winding current of fear.She forced herself to focus on the spell until it was finished.Her scrawls burned away in a flash of silver flame, leaving the stable’s supports both stronger and more flexible, hopefully able to withstand a blow from any debris of the tower’s collapse.
Owyn turned his gaze skywards and blinked rapidly, then stared.He pushed off from the wall and bolted from the stable.
‘Owyn!’Fola dashed after him and only managed to catch the fluttering end of his cloak, pulling him up short.He whirled on her, menaced her for a moment with Abal’s Hammer—no longer pulsing with magic, only a strange, inert shape of reddish glass.He looked again to the sky.
‘It should be over,’ he snarled, then pounded the side of his head with his palm.‘But I still hear them!Why won’t the sky clear?Why won’t the wailing end?’
He swung the hammer in a wide arc, as though to strike again at the tower.Its stones had lost their green shadows and begun to bow inwards.Dark cracks that glowed with a cold, eerie starlight spiderwebbed the tree.The sight seized Fola with a sudden awe.Here was a relic of the First Folk, a rival even to the great constructs of the City of the Wise, shattering.A thing she doubted anyone had witnessed before.She had sabotaged the dread engines of Ulun, but the ancient powers that had driven them remained intact.Here, she would witness the unleashing of long-bound energies on a scale unimaginable.
Bryngodre might very well be rendered a crater, a rival to Abal’s scar.Burn it, the kingdom might be reduced to ash.
And Colm was still inside the tower.As was the woman Fola had agreed to rescue, in exchange for Siwan’s life.To say nothing of her bird—her only insurance, here in the wider world, against the finality of death.
‘I did what you wanted!’Owyn roared.‘Now leave us in peace!’
Fola pressed her thaumaturgist’s loupe to her eye, half from sheer curiosity, half from a slow-building recognition that she was not done, yet, with the tower.For Colm, for Siwan and for herself, she would have to plunge back into the chaos.Her hope that she might be able to make some sense of the destruction was dashed immediately.To even begin to describe the dance of powers, the fraying of so complex a weave as the green tower and the Old Stones, would have taken months of study.She had only moments.
Nothing for it, then, but to plunge into the maelstrom blind.
She seized Owyn by the collar of his shirt.He looked at her, stunned, as though he had forgotten she was even there.
‘Stay in the stable with Ifan,’ she insisted.‘I’ll be right back.’
It was its own sort of madness to trust the prince as caregiver for his wounded, half-conscious enemy, but she had no choice.She gave Owyn a shove back towards the mouth of the stable.He just went on staring at her, confused and incredulous, the hammer hanging limp in his hand.
‘Bleed it,’ she muttered.‘Just don’t get yourself killed.’
