Light the Reign (The Forgotten: Book 3) (27 page)

“To transport an army up to stop the beasts,”
Katya was thoughtful now. She had been counting on the support of
both Gelendan and Treymayne, knowing that the two were in talks to
possibly merge. Though Treymayne had been the one to first suggest
it, they had gotten cold feet when the Bricrui curse first
appeared. Even so, Katya was sure that Layna could convince them to
help. If they were able to actually get an army onto the Plains,
before the beast horde had moved into populated areas, it was
possible that they could contain the catastrophe before it even
became one. “We have been planning an attack in an area which we
hope will give us a strategic advantage. Just before the horde hits
the edge of Gelendan, the Plains filter into a canyon as the
landscape changes. If the beasts continue on their current course,
they should all pass through this one section. We were hoping to be
able to just sit on the rims of the canyon and pick as many of them
off as we could.”

“And if there was an army there to help you
do it,” Layna sighed in relief, “this may not be as much of an
issue as I feared.” She frowned. “Though I hate that it will mean
more lives lost. There have been so many already.”

Katya’s friend closed her eyes for a minute.
The worry and regret made her look ten years older for a brief
moment, but when she opened her eyes again, there was nothing in
them but a fierce determination.

“Thank you again, Katya, without you, we
would not have even known that this threat existed.”

“Nor would it exist if I hadn’t convinced all
the tribes to give me their stones,” she pointed out.

“But then the Bricrui would still have its
claws in us.” She sighed again, this time resigned. “I feel as
though we are back in the Dark King’s tomb; one booby-trap after
another, luring you into a false sense of security before hitting
you with the next one.”

As Katya had not been with her when they had
gone through the tomb, this reference didn’t have as much meaning
to her, but she heard Gryffon chuckle slightly in the
background.

“Well, then it’s settled,” she said instead
of commenting. “We’ll prepare the gate and get your army through.
The bloodbeasts will never know what hit them.”

CHAPTER 15

Layna looked out across the battleground in
frustration. Though the spot that Katya had picked was indeed the
best strategically, people were still dying. She could feel it as
their life forces were extinguished. Katya’s first estimates of
just how many beasts there were in the horde had proved to have
been made prematurely, as they continued to pour out of the portal
seemingly without end.

Something hit the shield surrounding her with
a resounding thud, and she turned her attention back to the battle.
Spying the small creature that had tried to get past her defenses,
she took aim at the thing. It turned back to her and gave her a
malicious grin. It was a tiny humanoid creature, with a long spiked
tail and horns. Black scales ran the length of its body, stopping
at its head, where it blended into the thick leathery skin of its
face and dark spiny hair.

She shot a bolt of electrical energy at it,
she preferred fire, but had found that many of these beasts were
resistant to it. Some were even perpetually
on
fire. Seeing
the bolt coming towards it at blinding speed wiped the grin off the
thing’s face, and it maneuvered to get out of the way.

When it had moved so that the bolt’s path
would take it by him harmlessly, he turned and smiled at her again.
Layna smiled back, turning his expression to one of confusion, and
at the very last second, she adjusted the energy’s direction,
hitting the little beast square in the chest. He exploded into a
fiery ball of flame, then extinguished.

The bloodbeasts came in all shapes and sizes.
Some Layna could determine what the beast was originally, but some
were so contorted that she would never have been able to guess what
it had been before the change. Some, like the little creature she
had just dispatched, seemed to have almost human-like
personalities, but others retained their animal thoughts, driven
mad by constant pain. She couldn’t imagine having lived during the
Dark King’s reign, having these beasts allowed in the world.

She felt more of the army dying, and bit
straight through her lip in frustration. There were too many! She
glanced over at Gryffon and saw that he was holding his own. Not
that she had needed to do so as their magic was combined and she
could feel it, but the reassurance made her feel better anyway.

All of a sudden, a great looming creature
appeared in the distance from the direction of the portal. It must
be something very large that had only recently come out of its
prison. Layna squinted at it, trying to determine just what it was,
but couldn’t make it out. She held off several creatures attacking
her, while still peering into the distance at this new foe.

As it drew closer, she sucked in her breath.
If she didn’t know any better, she would swear that it was a dragon
winging its way towards them. It pumped the air with great wings,
wobbling slightly, and came closer and closer. Frantic shouting
broke out among the troops as they caught sight of the massive
beast, and arrows and spells were flung towards it. It was still
out of range, overly excited as they were by its sudden appearance
into the battle, and the missiles mostly missed their target.

The dragon-beast roared its rage anyway,
throwing its head back in a strange manner. Layna took out her
sword, Leoht, and slashed at a beast that was climbing up over the
lip of the canyon. It looked to be some sort of raccoon or other
small rodent-like beast that had been horribly mangled and had
overly-long claws which it used to scale the steep cliff.

She saw an opening and lunged at it, spearing
the creature through its heart, and it gurgled and twitched, dying
before her as she retrieved her sword. She looked up again at the
approaching dragon creature and scrunched her brow in confusion.
There was something very disfigured about it. Not that it was
unusual with these beasts, but this one seemed almost
disjointed.

It had reached the battleground now, and it
made a roaring pass at those on Layna’s side of the canyon wall. It
knocked several soldiers to their deaths below, and snapped another
up in its great mouth. It whooshed past Layna with a sickening
blast of putrid air, and she almost lost the contents of her
stomach as she realized why it looked so odd.

She had been trying to figure out how they
had managed to turn a dragon – the most powerful creature Layna
knew of – into a bloodbeast. Or perhaps had somehow made another
creature simply grow to be that large and take on the shape of a
dragon. But it turned out not to be either of those theories.

Layna looked closely at the thing as it swept
past, and saw, to her horror, that it wasn’t one large creature at
all. The dragon was made up of dozens of smaller creatures – she
thought she saw the shapes of bats in the wings, snakes on the
tail, and many other animals she couldn’t immediately recognize.
Its wingtip faltered a bit and just brushed against a bear-like
creature below, which reared up and swiped at it with a massive
paw. The two engaged in a bloody battle of their own for a few
moments, before the bear ended up torn apart in the dragon’s teeth.
Its jaw bore a striking resemblance to a creature Layna had read
about that lived in the ocean: sharks. She couldn’t imagine how
they would have come across one of those.

The pain radiating off the dragon was much
worse than the rest of the bloodbeasts. All of them had an aura of
suffering; the pain they endured while being turned into what they
were, combined with the spells made to keep them in a pain-induced
rage. But whether it was just because there were so many of them
making up one beast, or that the spells necessary to keep them
together and working as a larger whole were even more painful, she
didn’t know. All she knew was that even having the beast near her
caused her physical pain. She could only imagine the poor creatures
that had been used to make it.

She caught Gryffon’s eye and saw that he wore
the same pained grimace. Obviously he was feeling the effects as
well. The thunderhead that had appeared above the portal rolled
along with the passage of the beasts, and rain started pouring down
on them. The clouds boiled outwards, filling the sky with a sense
of dread. Crows cawed in the distance.

All of a sudden, out of the corner of her
eye, Weylyn – the hellhound she had saved – caught her eye, winding
through the army, snapping at stray beasts. A sudden inspiration
hit her. She had hoped at the beginning of the battle to save some
of the beasts by healing them as she had the ones that had been
made by the Order, but there had simply proved to be too many of
them and the changes too ingrained. Many were so grotesque that it
was difficult to see the animal behind the monster. Seeing Weylyn
and feeling the pain of this dragon-beast gave her renewed
motivation.

She spared a moment’s concentration for an
internal debate over how she might be able to erase the horrors
that had been done to these poor beasts so long ago. The spells
she’d used to heal Weylyn and the others would have to be
modified…yes! She grasped onto an idea which would allow her to
bypass the outer layers of the creatures, into the true being
within. It just might work! But how would she affect them all?

-The rain
- said Gryffon’s voice in her
head -
use the rain
.-

Layna sent a tendril of love and thanks over
their connection and set straight to work. Rather than try and
focus her energy on each beast individually, she would, as Gryffon
suggested, use the rain as a delivery system to get it to them all
at once.

When she had come across Weylyn for the first
time – when he was one of Jezebel’s hellhounds, hunting her and
Gryffon through the woods – she had seen the pain and suffering he
had been through and her instincts had led her to cleanse him of
the evil inflicted upon him. Her sheer determination that he be
fixed allowed her to wash clean the sins committed against him,
turning him back into the dog he had started out as. She focused on
doing the same to all these beasts, using the rain to get it to
them.

Up in the clouds, she set her spell into
motion.

She felt Gryffon’s energy added to hers.

She wound the spell around the water in the
atmosphere, ready to spill upon the earth and onto the creatures
below, so that it would wash away the blood-magic on them as it
fell.

She felt another mage’s power added, and
another’s, and realized that Gryffon must be rounding them all up
to help her.

But it wasn’t enough. She strained against
the limits of her own power, drawing as much as she could from
those supporting her, but she knew it still wasn’t quite as much as
the spell needed. The clouds lit up with an unearthly light, but
the spell couldn’t release. She drew more power and felt as she
began to drain the mages around her, and her own power as well.

The amount of magic she had already expended,
along with the immense strength it took to control the spell, made
her weaken, and the enchantment suddenly spiraled out of control.
Instead of her controlling the energy being taken from the mages
connected to it, it began to draw up the power it needed to
complete itself without reserve.

She fought against it, trying to use herself
to buffer the others, but it was too strong. She felt her legs
buckling beneath her, and out of the corner of her eye, saw Gryffon
falling to the ground as well. It overpowered her wearied body, and
she lurched like a rag-doll beneath its ravenous appetite, as it
pulled the power through her.

She felt another power swirling around her,
the energy released as the soldiers and beasts alike fell in the
battle. She gritted her teeth together.

The spell drew more power, on the verge of
releasing, but Layna knew that as it did so, it would require one
last burst of energy, energy that was just barely sustaining the
life of the mages. Gryffon’s face was contorted with pain, as the
increased magic flowing through them burned at his insides.

The power was right there, all she had to do
was take it. She wasn’t the one causing the pain and death, she
would just be harnessing the power from it before it made its way
back into the natural flow.

It still felt wrong. She felt dirty even
considering it. It was blood-magic, no matter how she might try to
rationalize it, and she would be soiling herself by using it.

The spell skipped, and she felt one of the
lesser mages on the brink of death. If she didn’t, they would all
die. In a split second, she made the decision. Reaching out to
gather the energies of the dead and the dying around her, she added
them to the spell in the clouds, finalizing its purpose. She
screamed in agony as pain shot through her neck, where her mark
was. It felt as though someone was pressing a red hot iron to her
flesh and holding it there. It spread throughout her body in a
white hot torrent of pain, but still she held onto the spell.

When the pain lessened enough so that she
could control herself, she unleashed the enchantment, letting it
rain down on the beasts below. She opened her eyes, and watched in
awe as the rain seemed to light up around her, glowing droplets of
her spell falling to the earth.

As the water hit the beasts, steam rose from
those who had been enchanted to stay on fire. Though the rain
itself hadn’t been able to touch the eternal flames, the spelled
rain did, and doused them. Some of them howled in rage or
confusion, it was hard to tell. Many of them stopped their advance,
shuddering on the ground.

The army, unaware of the enchantment, took
advantage of the enemy’s sudden halted movements, and charged in at
them, wiping out a large portion of them before Gryffon sent the
signal to cease fire. Layna sent him a grateful look.