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Lodestone and Splinter
Three ways there are to make a lich. By corpse-dream and miasma they are raised, but by splinter they are born into darkness. Even kinbonds shatter when a fragment pierces the pulse; yea, even love is set aside when the heart is nathlàs-riven.
—The Saga of Dragulein
The eldest son of Tharos cried out again, seeking to thrash; it took much strength to hold him. The only good thing about cold and fatigue was that it made slipping the chain of my physical self easier; the draughts of the Elder helped too, for they strengthen more than flesh.
“Do not touch her!” Arn snapped. “Or I shall strike thee, and to kill.”
The wound pulsed under my touch, swelling with fever-fire. The body knew it had been invaded and was burning with a wolf’s vitality, attempting to evict the intruder.
And it told me, in its own silent way, of its ailment—a single sliver of thin blackened metal, colder than the Glass and malignant as well.
It strained from my grasp, even with the lodestone’s aid. Such stones attract certain things, andseidhrmay magnify the pull. I made a low frustrated sound, weak from the spending of my vital force upon calling a vast gout ofaelflame.
The thing lost in the wound had a baleful intelligence all its own, burrowing through Eol’s flesh like a drilling insect in rotten wood.It fought my grasp, a bleak chillabsencelike unto that between stars. AnyseidhrI could summon vanished into its hunger, though I could well see its path with inner vision, black against the glow of a living body. My wrists twinged, ink-marks flaming with pain, and the runes danced between the bands.
The splinter worked unerringly upon its heartward path with sickening, twitch-serpent wriggles, dodging myseidhr-grasp. I should not have been aware of anything around me, but my concentration fragmented, and I hissed out an obscenity a warrior at axe-practice would have found eminently understandable.
Arn’s voice, raised. Aeredh, seeking to reason and restore calm. Daerith hissing that we had to fleenow, there was no use in wasting time for a Secondborn stabbed by a heartseeker. And Efain, sayingI will not leave him, quietly but with great force as the wind rose whirling over the Glass. The keening in the weather’s rising song could have been a snow-hag breathing its last, or… summat else.
I was too weary and had lost too much strength; even another reckless spending of my inner reserves achieved little. I cursed again, my voice breaking—I had done nothing right since leaving Dun Rithell, and this failure would crown all the others.
No. I will do this. By all the gods, you shall not take this man from me.
The splinter squirted free of my grasp again. I sobbed out a breath, a prayer to Baldyr the Wounded losing strength as my lungs halted, my heart stuttering under a too-heavy burden.
Just as hope left me, tears standing behind my eyelids and my teeth clenched fit to shatter, a warm spot dilated upon my back. A flood of strength filled me, crown to soles. It was not the fitful sharing Idra and I could perform for each other, nor the simple warming Aeredh had done upon the road to Nithraen.
This was a deeper gift, life offered without reserve, and I took it without question. The splinter fought further, its cold cresting triumph turning at the last moment into a screech of cheated ire, but with the lodestone’s pull and that deluge of heat and bright blue light, I wrenched a thin shard of blackened metal free of Eol’s flesh, further tearing the wound.
He screamed as it left his shoulder. I did too.
Our paired cries were lost in the Glass’s fresh howling, for a storm had descended over that vast bowl. Blood pumped hot against my skin; the splinter stung my fingers and I tossed it away, then clapped my palm over the wound, attempting to dam the flow.
The hole in Eol’s shoulder resisted. I could not close it wholly, but with Elak helping to apply pressure and the hot flood ofseidhrpassing through my own flesh we managed to stanch somewhat, and bind. Daerith plucked the cold steel splinter from the snow where it lay steaming, wrapping it in a scrap of black cloth torn from his own mantle. I found myself blinking and headsore, my knees quaking and Aeredh’s left hand flattened against the small of my back, pressing hard enough I could feel his fingers through mantle, dress, and shift alike.
His right hand clasped the leaf-blade of Arn’s spear, and now I knew how the Elder bled, for gold-tinged crimson welled against the sharpness. He stared at my shieldmaid, his blue eyes half-closed and his entire body tense as a stone statue as he held her attack in quivering quiescence.
He had touched me duringseidhr, and she had struck. Arn surged forward, her boots digging in powdery snow; Aeredh’s hand left me, and I staggered.
The Elder’s palm and fingers were badly cut, and I could only distract Arneior by calling her name, for I needed her aid to stand. Eol still bled, though sluggishly. Most of the Northerners were wounded in one way or another; the remaining Elder regarded Arn as they might a viper and me as something even less natural, perhaps.
But the son of Tharos, heir to the House of Naras, was still alive.
At least, for the moment.
There are songs of our passage along the Maraekhos—that particular spur of the Black Land’s shield-wall, part of the Marukhennor’s greater chain—to the Ice Door. Though Elder may move swiftly at great need they were also carrying Arn and me, and the sagas are true when they say even Aeredh the Crownless was near the end ofhis great strength. It is also sung how the wolves of Naras bore their wounded captain; though free of thenathlàs’s poisoned sword-shard, he could not shift to the other form sharing his skin or call upon the wolf’s burning ability to fully heal.
What no saga may truly describe is the weariness, the cold, the stinging wind against our cheeks, and the fear as howls both wind-made and otherwise echoed from the Glass’s crevasse-depths to the black peaks of Agramar’s skirts. For we were upon the very feet of mountains the Enemy raised during his great war with the Vanyr and Aesyr, just where they curve as if to scoop up Dorael, like a healing root grubbed by a crescent blade into avolva’s waiting hand.
I saw the borders of the Black Land for the first time then, and the darkness which hung upon them.
The forests there are grim, massive thick-clustered and oddly twist-shaped trees rising behind tortured, pleated foothills. Above, sharp sheer pinnacles are draped with a shadow made of neither tree-crowding nor weather haze, but a thickening of air itself. Sometimes during ill winters or damp summers the darkness creeps down those gorges and drops, questing blindly amid the lowlands; we were lucky to go no closer.
Ifeltit, though. In those forests even an Elder’s wound might not properly heal, and the undergrowth is full of creeping, slinking things half-seen even in the depths of treecrack freeze. They poured the last of thesithevieldown my throat amid that shadow, and something else into Arn; she submitted resentfully, glaring at Aeredh whenever he passed too near.
I could not smooth her temper. I was numb from insensate toes to my slipping braids, snow collecting upon my mantle-hood and every space inside me bare-frozen as the Glass’s flooded mirror. Night cast a cloak over the soughing forest, and with it came soft whispers.
