A Realm of Shadows (9 page)

Kyra held tight to
Theon’s scales as they flew north, racing through the clouds, the sky around them
darkening into a gloom as they neared the land of Marda. Softis’s words still rang
in her head as she recalled her eerie visit to Volis, her visit with her ancestors,
their spirits lingering as if they were still with her.

Do not shy from
danger, Kyra. Seek it out. That is the only way to save your life.

She felt it to
be true. She felt she was on a sacred mission, and she felt the responsibility
of living up to her bloodline, of all her ancestors, of achieving what they
could not. True freedom for Escalon. Safety from the trolls. Safety from the
dragons. Why was it, she wondered, that true freedom was always so elusive?
That true safety was always so hard to achieve, generation after generation?

Flying further
and further north, Kyra felt an increasing chill in the air. It was not so much
the cold and the gloom as it was a sense of impending evil. She looked down,
hoping to catch one last glimpse of Escalon before entering Marda, and
expecting to see what she saw every day of her life growing up in Volis: the massive
Wall of Flames shooting up into the sky, lighting the oncoming night. It would
be thrilling to fly over them, to see how high they rose.

And yet, as she
flew closer to the border and peered down below, she was baffled to see
nothing. She looked twice, unsure of herself.

“Lower, Theon,”
she commanded.

Theon dove
lower, descending through layer after layer of thick, black clouds, until finally
they burst through and she caught a glimpse of the landscape below.

Her heart
stopped in her chest.

There, below
her, was a sight which would be forever ingrained in her soul. A sight which
made her lose all hope. Kyra was shocked not by what she saw—but by what she
did
not
see. By the
absence
. There, below, the Flames were gone.

For the first
time in her life, Kyra saw the northern border not dominated by their
ever-present glow, their crackle. What stood instead was charred land and open
sky, with no barrier left between Escalon and Marda. The sacred wall of protection,
the magical Flames, forever guarded by her forefathers, stood no more.

Even more
shocking, in its place Kyra saw the nation of trolls racing across the
landscape, flooding her homeland, the two countries now one, with nothing to
stop them. Thousands upon thousands of trolls raced by underneath her, like a
heard of buffalo, their rumble and cheering audible even from here. They were
leaving Marda by the millions, a great migration, and invading her country.

Kyra’s blood
boiled at the sight. She could already see all the burned, ransacked villages
left in their wake, could already see the destruction this tidal wave of trolls
was bringing to her homeland.

“Theon, down!”
she yelled.

Theon needed no
prodding. He dove straight down, until they were but thirty feet above them.

“FIRE!” she
shrieked.

Theon opened his
mouth and breathed before she uttered the command, the two thinking the same
thing at the same time.

Down below, the
trolls looked up, shock and terror in their eyes. They shrieked as Theon
breathed a column of flame, cutting a swath of death right down the middle of
their ranks. The great sound of flames merged with his roar, and he flew over
them, for mile after mile, killing tens of thousands of trolls. More than one
threw a spear or lance his way, but Theon was stronger now, and able to burn
the weapons with the intense heat of his flames before they even reached him.

Finally, though,
there came a hissing noise, and Kyra saw that Theon, still a baby, needed to
replenish his fire. She took stock of what they had done, all the dead trolls, and
was about to take pride in it, when she looked up ahead and saw an even bigger
wave of trolls coming.

Her heart sank.
Her attack had hardly made a dent. Escalon, she knew, was finished. She knew
then that the only hope left would be for her to fulfill her mission.

“Higher, Theon!”
she commanded.

Theon rose as the
new wave of trolls hurled spears and lances into the sky; he flew higher and
higher, just out of their reach, and soon they were back into the clouds. Kyra flew
faster toward Marda. She closed her eyes and knew she needed to focus, to shake
the visions from her mind. The only hope for her homeland, she knew, lay
paradoxically farther north, deep in the heart of Marda.

*

Kyra felt the
chill wrap around her shoulders, like a cloak of evil embracing her, as she
entered the land of Marda. She felt an immediate shift in the air, something
heavy and moist, like a dark spell pervading this place, gripping her, holding
her tight. The sky immediately darkened, so much so that she was no longer able
to tell if it were day or night. It hung there, in the gloom, not quite light
and not quite dark, a perpetual twilight. Slivers of scarlet punctuated the
thick, black clouds, as if the sky itself were bleeding.

Down below was hardly
better. The landscape held no signs of life, just stretches of black dirt, ash,
and outcroppings of black rock. There was no vegetation, no trees, and a myriad
of volcanoes, molten lava pouring down the sides. She saw lakes of lava, and rivers
of them cutting across the landscape in every direction.

Despite the
lava, the land was cold—and it stank of sulfur—and the air was so thick with
ash it was hard to breathe. Kyra could not have imagined anything worse in her
darkest dreams. It looked like hell itself had found a place on earth.

As she flew, Kyra
felt a deepening foreboding, a tightness in her chest. She had no idea where
she was going, driven only by blind instinct, by the mandate of her mother, and
she could not help but feel she would never return.

She scoured the
landscape for a marker, any sign, any indication of where she should go. She
searched for any road, something that might point her to the Staff of Truth. Yet
she saw none.

The deeper into
Marda she flew, the more lost she felt, wondering where to go in the vast and
never-ending bleakness, wondering if she would ever even find what she was sent
here for. Finally, as she looked down, she spotted something that caught her
eye. It was movement, something in the landscape that stood out. It was
gushing, black on black.

“Lower, Theon,”
she whispered.

Theon dove, and
as they descended beneath the gloom of layers of clouds, she began to see more
clearly. There below was a gushing river of black, cutting through a landscape
of blackness. It wound its way north, inexplicably uphill, through a narrow cut
between two tall peaks.

As she watched
it, Kyra sensed something lay on the far side of those mountains. She sensed in
her heart that it was where she needed to go.

“Down, Theon.”

Theon flew
toward the peaks, Kyra planning to fly over them—yet as they neared, Theon
suddenly, to her shock, screeched and came to a sudden stop in the air.

He flailed, and would
not proceed.

“What is it,
Theon?” she asked.

His words come
to her in her head.

I cannot fly
forward.

Kyra looked out and
with a sense of dread realized there was some sort of invisible force here, a
shield keeping Theon out. She looked down at the landscape, the gushing river,
the mouth of it waiting below her, and she knew it was where she was meant to
go. She needed to travel that river to the other side of those mountains, and
it was a journey, she realized, she would have to take alone.

With a pang of
panic, Kyra realized she would have to leave Theon here.

“Down, Theon,”
she said softly. “I will land.”

Theon reluctantly
heeded her, diving and touching down beside the mouth of the river. As she
dismounted, she felt a creepy feeling beneath her feet as she stepped onto a soft,
mossy landscape, all black.

Theon lowered
his head, looking ashamed—and looking concerned for her.

Return with me,
Theon said to
her in her mind.
Let us leave this place together.

Kyra slowly
shook her head, stroking the scales on his long nose.

“I cannot,” she
said. “My destiny lies here. Fly south, and await me in Escalon.”

Kyra looked over
at the slow-moving river and saw a wide, black raft, made of logs tied together,
waiting at the mouth of the river, as if only for her. On the raft stood a
being, perhaps a man, perhaps some kind of evil creature, his back to her, wearing
a black cloak, holding a long staff, its tip in the water. He did not turn to
face her.

Theon lowered
his head and pushed it against hers, and Kyra rubbed his scales and kissed him.

“Go, my friend,”
she commanded.

Theon finally screeched
and leapt into the air, his great talons just missing her. He spread his wings
wide and flew off, never looking back, his screech the only reminder that he was
ever here. Soon, the sky was empty. Theon was gone.

Kyra turned, a
pit in her stomach, and walked over to the raft. Slowly, she stepped foot on
it.

It rocked as she
did, unsteady beneath her feet, her heart pounding in her throat. She felt
completely and utterly alone, more alone than she’d ever had in her life.

She gripped her
staff tight.

“Let us go,” she
said to the creature, sensing it was awaiting her command.

Its back still
to her, it reached forward with its staff and dragged the river’s bottom, and
soon they were off, their raft floating downriver, into the blackness—and into
the very heart of hell.

Softis made his
way slowly through the ruins of Volis, picking his way with his staff, walking,
remembering. He paused at the remnant of a wall and ran his hand along its edge,
still smooth, and recalled playing here as a boy. He remembered, as a boy, knowing
that Volis would last forever.

Softis recalled his
father and grandfather, remembered playing at their feet, learning about all
the great historians, the famed Chroniclers of the Kingdom who had traveled
from Andros. He knew there was no higher calling, and he had known as soon as
he could walk that it was what he was meant to do. For him, it was the
histories that held the glory, not the waging of wars. Wars, after all, faded
away, while the Chroniclers made them live forever.

Softis breathed
deeply as he continued walking, his staff gently picking through rocks. He was
alone now, utterly alone, everyone he knew and loved dead. For some strange reason
he could not understand, he had been cursed with the mixed blessing of
survival. And he had survived. He had survived his grandfather, his father, his
wife, his siblings—and even all his children. He had survived kings and wars, one
commander after the next. He had seen Escalon under many forms of rule, yet had
never seen it entirely free. Nearly a hundred years old now, he had outlived it
all.

Softis knew he could
find a way to go on, a way to live without the men and women and children, whom
he dearly missed but was nearly too blind to see now; he could live without the
variety of food, finding a way to subsist only on foraged grasses and berries,
food he was too old to truly taste anyway. But what he could not live without,
what made him feel most alone of all, was the loss of his books. Those savages
had destroyed them all, and in the process had torn apart his soul.

Well, not all of
them. One book, hidden deep beneath a stone vault, Softis had hidden and salvaged.
It was this book, The Chronicles of his Fathers, an oversized, leather-bound
book with pages so worn from use that they nearly fell out, that Softis gripped
to his chest now as he walked. It was all he had left to live for.

Escalon, he
concluded, was haunted. It was both a blessed and a cursed land. It had always been
haunted by the threat of dragons, the threat of trolls, the threat of Pandesia.
It was a place of great beauty and yet, paradoxically, a place where one could
never truly rest easy. There was some riddle to this land, something he could
never quite figure out. He had been turning over the legends in his mind for
nearly a hundred years, and there was something, he felt, that was missing. Something,
perhaps, that was even withheld from him, some secret even too great for him,
for his forefathers. What was it?

Perhaps it was contained
in some missing book, some missing scroll, some missing legend he had not yet
heard. There was something, he was convinced, that solved it all, that made
sense of the mysterious origin of Escalon, and of what had both cursed and
blessed it.

Now, as his eyes
dimmed and he faced the waning of his life, it was no longer life he craved, but
knowledge
. Wisdom. The unraveling of secrets. And most of all, the
answer to that mystery. Softis knew how history would end. It would end how all
men ended. In death. In nothing. But he still did not know how the story
began
.
And in some ways, in his eyes, that was more important.

Softis picked
his way farther through the rubble, this ghost town filled only with the faint
sound of his staff, of the gales of wind rushing through here and finding no
one. Finding a small, old stale piece of bread, he reached down and picked it
up, hard as a rock, wondering how many weeks it had sat there. Still, he was
grateful for it, knowing it would be his best find of the day. It would give
him energy enough, at least, for the walk. On his way to the mausoleum, he
would visit old friends, immerse himself in old times. He would close his eyes
and imagine his father alive with him again, telling him story after story.
That comforted him. Indeed, he was more comforted by ghosts these days than by
the living.

As he picked his
way across the courtyard, Softis suddenly stopped and stood. He had felt
something. Had it been a tremor?

He felt it again,
running up through his staff to his palm, something so faint he wondered if it
had even come. But then, sure enough, it came again. This time, the tremor was
a shake, and then a rumble. He stopped, feeling it now in the soles of his
feet, and he turned and looked up, out through the broken arch that was once the
formidable gate to Volis.

There was something
on the horizon. It was faint, at first, like a cloud of dust. But it grew as he
watched. It became an outline, a dark shadow, an army forming on the horizon.

And then it
became thunder.

A moment later,
the stampede came. They came racing over the hill, sounding like a herd of
buffalo. They filled the horizon, the shouts audible now even to his deaf ears.
They charged and filled the barren hillside, all coming, he was amazed to see,
right for Volis.

What could they
want with Volis?

As they came
closer, he realized there was nothing they wanted here. Volis merely had the
bad fortune of standing in their way.

They charged
through the gate, and finally, Softis could see them clearly. As he did, his
heart froze in his chest. These were no humans. Nor were they Pandesians.

Trolls.

An entire nation
of trolls.

Halberds raised
high, shrieking, vicious, blood in their eyes, they swarmed the land like locusts,
clearly determined to destroy every last blade of grass in Escalon, to leave no
thing unturned. It was as if the gates of hell had been unleashed.

As Softis stood
there, in the center of Volis, the last man left alive, he realized they were coming
right for him. Finally, for the first time in his life, death had targeted him.

Softis did not
run. He did not cower. Instead, he stood there proudly, and for the first time
in his life, he did his best to raise his arched back so that he would stand
straight and tall, as his father might have done.

The trolls
thundered through the gates, halberds held high, lowering them right for him,
and Softis clutched his book to his chest, and he smiled. The curse of his life
was over.

Finally, he had
been blessed with death.