The Azure Wizard (15 page)

“Where was that from?” Ethan inquired with a weak smile.

She only smirked and shrugged. “It just,” she began with a short pause as she contemplated it herself, “felt like the right time.”

Ethan nodded, still smiling, and May asked, “Well, did you find the Snake Root?”

Ethan motioned towards his open palm with his soaked head, and May followed his motion. There in his hand were the three sprigs of the herb.

Ethan’s strength quickly returned after his eyes stopped glowing and the two of them rushed back to their camp to pack things so that they could get on the move back downriver to Greenwell City. Ethan thought about trying to quickly wash his vomit-soaked cloak in the river, but when he brought it to the riverside he decided to just throw it in. He could hopefully get another back at the compound. When he returned to May she had her uniform completely on over black trousers and her white tunic, and she was pulling her damp hair back into a ponytail.

Ethan didn’t bother going through his satchel to look for a shirt, and he thus strapped on his leather cuirass over his bare torso. After slipping on his gauntlets and boots he slung his satchel and water skin over his shoulder so that they hung on his lower back, and finally buckled his broad leather belt around his waist. May paced nervously about their campsite as Ethan got ready, and when he was done they wordlessly bolted off to the southeast, following the Three Baronies River as dusk settled on the woodlands.

As it grew darker and the mist thickened again they found themselves stumbling often through the wet heavy undergrowth as they hurried along. Ethan clenched his jaw and stayed as close as he could behind the agile May who was obviously much more adept at bounding through the woods and seeing in the dark than he was. She turned her head partly around and shouted, “Was that Wizardcraft, Ethan?”

Ethan didn’t immediately answer but instead thought about it himself as he ran. He was sure what he saw was real. It wasn’t a delusion or a hallucination. He knew that he was witnessing distant events as they were unfolding in the present time. He remembered a shred of some tale that claimed that when young Wizards first manifested Wizardcraft powers they often received visions or prophecies. He couldn’t explain what happened, but he knew that the Wizards in the tales he had heard of didn’t retch like sick babes when they conjured their powers. Finally he answered, “I don’t know.”

They ran in silence for a time, until the heart of night when all was darkest in the land. Frogs croaked along the river bank and hopped into the safety of the waters as the two Foresters crashed along, through ferns and over logs. Ethan couldn’t help himself as his gaze was drawn to the countless fireflies that throbbed in their pale green glow throughout the surrounding woods and over the river. They made him think of his own eyes glowing and he shuddered.

“May, I don’t think we’re going to make it back in time!” Ethan exclaimed through gritted teeth as the futility of what they were trying to do finally settled on him like a bag of rocks.

She stated flatly, “I know.”

Suddenly the storyteller was overwhelmed with a feeling that he couldn’t easily explain. It started as a tickle of a feeling in his stomach, like the butterflies of nervousness, but soon it spread out through his chest and extremities. The feeling somehow brought him to the conclusion that there was something he could do. He didn’t know how or why, but he nonetheless knew. The feeling scared him.

He instantly stopped running, and it was a few moments before his companion realized that she was running alone. She whirled around and cried, “What in the Soul Wastes are you doing, Ethan? We have to try to get help! It’s our duty as Foresters!”

“We can’t make it this way,” he said just above a whisper.

May froze as solid as a block of ice when she saw Ethan’s eyes begin to shed a faint blue light. As the glow strengthened he said in a hollow emotionless voice, “May, hurry over to me. I can’t see you.”

He sounded frightened and so was she, but she swallowed down her fear and crept back towards the Vharian. When she reached him she reached out with her trembling hands and placed them on both of Ethan’s bare sweaty arms, surprisingly hard and corded as they flexed, tension infected every inch of his wiry body. He stared right at her with his glowing blue eyes, but the stare was emotionless and vacant and she knew that he couldn’t see her.

She then felt a slight gust of wind emanate from Ethan. It was just enough to stir her hair and few blades of grass, but it shocked her like the gusts in a windstorm. The insects and frogs that had been so very vocal in their chorus as the two Forester’s had been sprinting down the river bank instantly and utterly silenced. The very forest in which they stood seemed to grow still and quiet so that one could think that they could even hear the mist moving. All at once the light of the fireflies was snuffed out and the shadowed woods became darker still, and Ethan’s illuminated eyes seemed to grow brighter.

“Ethan, what’s happening?” she whispered in shaky hushed tones.

Suddenly she felt ripples of energy in the body of the Vharian. They came like waves from his head to his feet and back again, and with each wave of energy more wind emanated from Ethan’s body, gusting outward into May and the surrounding woods. Her ponytail came undone and her shoulder-length blond hair danced in the wind above her dark brown woolen cloak that flapped in the gusts. As the winds intensified May gripped Ethan’s flexed arms as hard as she could so she didn’t get blown back from him and she trembled furiously. Tears of relief streamed down her plump cheeks when Ethan reached out and put his arms around her and pulled her in to him in a full-bodied embrace. She buried her face into his neck, and thus thankfully couldn’t see what followed.

The wind pouring from Ethan quit coming in waves, but instead flooded out as an endless continuously-intensifying blast of air that deluged in all directions around the embracing Foresters. The old thick limbs of the ancient willows and cedars that stood like solemn witnesses to this wonder creaked and groaned in strain. Grass and ground-foliage that shrouded the forest floor where they stood laid flat in the gusts before being uprooted and cast furiously away into the darkness. The mist was forced far back from the two just as moonlight poured through a rift that was torn in the cloud-cover far overhead, precisely above where Ethan and May stood. The pale sapphire moonlight mingled with the bright blue luminescence that poured from the storyteller’s eyes and he clenched his jaw, revealing his gritted teeth, at the carnage that ripped through and from his thin body.

The gusts reached a new level as blue light began to throb from the earth upon which the two companions stood embracing. It began to spiral up the duo in a double helix like the tendrils of some otherworldly nightmarish monstrosity. Abruptly then branches and tree limbs of the nearby trees snapped from their trunks and were dashed throughout the surrounding wood, shattering upon other tree trunks that also bent away from Ethan. The far shore of the Three Baronies River began flooding into the surrounding forest as the running waters were pushed away from the shore upon which the storyteller stood.

When the wind became its strongest the nearest trees that bent away from Ethan began to groan deeply in protest and crack around the trunk, sending shards of bark flying away through the forest. The pair of them were now completely cocooned in the blue light, and even that very light seemed to be being blown away from Ethan as ribbons of it snaked sideways in all directions, weaving around and between the strained trees.

Then, instantly, the light erupted upward in a thin straight column, a pillar to the stars that seemed to go up forever until it reached the Ancestor Lands. All sound instantly vanished in the surrounding woods that instant, and the furious winds abruptly ceased, completely and utterly. Discarded leaves, stones, and twigs rained down from the air as their supernatural journey suddenly stopped and the bowed trees shot back to their original position, sending what was left of their foliage showering down amongst the churned detritus of the forest floor. Only the thick pillar of blue light remained there, a beacon of Wizardcraft in a world where Wizardcraft was dead.

In the time of a hummingbird’s heartbeat the pillar of light exploded sending shards of intense cerulean light ripping though the nearby forest. In a blink every tree for five miles in every direction completely shattered into splinters as long as a child’s finger and the ground in that part of the forest quaked so furiously that its tremors could be felt adamantly from Stone’s Shore to Greenwell City. The waters of the Three Baronies River poured from their banks, flooding into the surrounding woods for miles where they would soon become land-locked and stagnant and become swampland to the south of Stone’s Shore.

Eventually, though, that night the carnage and turmoil subsided and all lay quiet and still for miles around. The River of the Three Baronies resumed its course to the Bay of Dawn and the fog and fireflies came back to the woods. The ten-mile wide section of woods that Ethan and May had once stood in the center of, though, laid empty and bare save for piles of pulverized wood and debris that floated in heaps throughout the churning shallow muddy waters. The two Foresters were nowhere to be found.

It seemed that Wizardcraft had returned to the land of the Three Baronies, and Ethan Skalderholt was its herald.

There were no words to describe the sudden bewildering journey that the Foresters took that night. It was horror and ecstasy, fear and joy, light and dark, civil and savage, hideous and gorgeous, all at once. The Ancestor Lands smiled at them and the Soul Wastes frowned. One could simply say that they were there and then they were here.

A few seconds after the world dissolved into blue nothingness May once again felt firm ground beneath her booted feet. Ethan crumpled away from her, crashing into an unconscious heap on the ground, and she was left there standing, eyes closed tightly and shaking in awe. Somehow she remained standing and eventually eased open her eyelids. She beheld a quiet night-enveloped wood of ancient oaks interspersed with pretty birch groves. The half-moon was behind her to the north and the hot summer air laid heavily on her. Their journey took them through time and space where temperature held no meaning and neither did sanity.

She intently scanned her surroundings until she could be positive that she was still in the Three Baronies. The thought made her smile and shake her head in wonder. It seemed even a little hotter and drier than where she and Ethan had been moments before, and she came to the conclusion that they must be over a hundred miles south of Greenwell City, halfway to Woodend which was on the border between the Barony of Greenwell and the Barony of Wendlith. As the awe and shock began to subside she thought of Ethan and shot her gaze down to the ground where he laid. May gasped.

Ethan lay unconscious on the forest floor which was shrouded in short dark ferns and oak leaves. But he was changed. Vibrant blue lines curved and snaked up the bare flesh of his slender arm between the cuff of his gauntlets and the shoulders of his leather cuirass. They glowed slightly with pale azure radiance but they quickly dimmed until the colored lines remained tattooed into his flesh. The mysterious serpentine sigils had no meaning to May, and she was horrified and confused when they didn’t eventually disappear from her friend’s naked arms after a few tense moments.

She knelt down in the ferns next to him and began to hurriedly unbuckle his Forester’s cuirass. With a huff she pulled the piece of hide armor over his head and tossed it to the ground beside them. Ethan’s thin muscular torso rose and fell heavily with each breath, and despite the beads of sweat that peppered his bare chest and arms he shivered as though he lay naked in the Ice Wilds. Thankfully though, May noticed, the blue sigils ended just slightly past the point where his shoulders connected with his chest.

“Ethan. Ethan, can you hear me?” May asked in a voice only slightly tinged in panic.

There was no reply from the unconscious storyteller except for a slight furrowing of his damp brow. That was good enough for May. She looked around once again at the surroundings that they had been whisked away to. Once May had her bearings on directions she grabbed Ethan’s limp arm, which was almost scalding to the touch, and heaved her companion onto her shoulders. She struggled mightily to stand, but after she finally got good footing she stood shakily to her feet, Ethan’s floppy form hanging from both shoulders. The Vharian weighed as much as she did, but May had trained herself to carry heavy loads if the need was evident. Tonight it surely was evident.

She took off at a steady clip southward, her back to the glaring half-moon. With the one-hundred and thirty pound load on her shoulders in addition to all of their equipment, May grunted and sweated more and more with each heavy stride. Numerous brambles and rotted logs forced her into a dangerous leap or a lengthy detour and the sweltering heat of the summer night laid heavily on her as though she were carrying another person in addition to Ethan.

After a horrendously tiring and strenuous twenty minutes passed, May felt reasonably comfortable that they had covered a fair amount of distance. She did not know, though, how far away or in what direction Kraegovich was. Her best guess was south because that was the direction the old Forester was heading according to Ethan’s vision. The thought of his vision and the thought of him transporting the two of them scores and scores of miles in an instant brought her to a slow distracted stop. Panting like a wolf she lowered her friend onto a dewy bed of grass and spongy mushrooms.

Ethan had used Wizardcraft. At least she thought it was Wizardcraft from what little mythic tales of ancient heroes of the Ancient Age she had been told by her mother and other Foresters of the Three Baronies as she was growing up. It was even whispered among Foresters that the legendary founder of the order, Lady Quinn the Martyr, used Wizardcraft herself though it was never documented in any tomes or stories. But what she had witnessed tonight could be nothing but the Wizardcraft of old. That meant that Ethan was a Wizard, the first known Wizard to be born in a thousand years. What that could mean, she did not know. What could that mean for the land of the Three Baronies?