The Legend of Asahiel: Book 03 - The Divine Talisman (51 page)

“Shall we to work?” his newfound companion urged. “His Glory ain’t intending to save any for the laggards.”

The dwarf turned an eye to Owl. Corathel watched the pair nod at each other in unspoken courtesy.

“Corporal, belay the retreat. All ahead march.” He felt a smile upon his lips. “Seems our day is not yet done.”

T
HE COVE LAY EMPTY.
O
VERHEAD,
a pocket of clouds caressed the round, radiant moon. A lamenting wind whistled amid the trees, scraped across crags in the seaside bluff, and combed the choppy surface of the ocean that grumbled below. All else was still, quiet. Yet Torin dared not breathe.

Annleia nudged him, rustling the foliage of their thick woodland shelter. Torin scowled, but never removed his gaze from the rocky beach. Beneath the shadows of the forested mountainside, the sea brewed patiently. Incoming waves were being shred by buried rocks and hidden boulders, ripped into foam and spray. Broken ledges glistened in the moonlight, wet from the salty surf. From their ridge above, Torin and Annleia watched it all, and waited.

“It’s out there,” Torin whispered, crouching deeper within the clammy underbrush.

“Do you see something?” Annleia asked, eyes wide as they searched the black breakers.

He studied her momentarily. Even in the pale moonlight, her emerald orbs shone deep and bright. “No,” he admitted, then looked again, out beyond the shore.
But I feel it.

“We must go down to meet Him,” Annleia said.

Torin managed to nod. His heart raced, fingers gripping the hilt of the Sword. At last, he shifted his gaze from the sea and turned to his companion.

“I’ll follow,” she offered.

He led in the direction she indicated, skulking through the underbrush along the forest’s edge. Damp leaves and wet branches slapped at him as he passed. Though mindful of his footing, he kept an eye at all times upon the ocean’s roiling surface, watching wave after wave be lured to the craggy shoreline. The sea would then recoil, sputtering in displeasure while licking its wounded swells. Seconds would pass in which the ocean drew another heaving breath, and a fresh billow would crash forward with renewed fury. Each time, he knew, the minced waters bore away tiny grains of the weathered shore—the eternal exchange between land and sea…

Upon reaching the narrow path that wound down the bluff, he paused for a steadying breath, then stepped out into the open.

It required his full focus to navigate the muddy, sandswept trail, which in some areas had been eroded completely by wind and rain. While aiding one another in half treading, half sliding down hundreds of feet along that steep, uncertain descent, he was almost able to forget their purpose in doing so. Only as it leveled off near the bottom did he look back up and realize how far
they would have to climb when this night’s meeting was finished.

Provided they were given the chance.

“Closer,” Annleia urged quietly. “We have to reach the water’s edge.”

The woman herself seemed in no great rush to do so. She continued to wait behind him, as if his feeble body could provide her some kind of shield against that which they must face. Torin looked beyond the dunes and debris piled at the base of the bluff, out past the deserted, stone-and-pebble beach to where dark waves continued to wrestle with shoreline rocks. His muscles knotted, and he found himself holding his breath. He felt naked here. The surf’s assault upon the unyielding shore was deafening at this level, its crush a thunderous echo within the cove’s horseshoe walls.
Intruders
, it seemed to roar.
Infidels.
Had they valued their lives, they would not have come.

He drew the Sword, and took what comfort he could from the warmth it unleashed within. With a white-knuckled grip, he started forward.

After that, his legs seemed to move irrespective of his will, dragging him ever closer to that dark, foaming tempest. Half a step behind, Annleia matched him stride for stride. Together, they stepped and stumbled over sand and seaweed and stone. Charging breakers loomed nearer, threatening to consume them, but invisible undertows held the sea’s fury in check. When at last the waves reached forth to soak his ankles, Torin felt Annleia’s restraining hand upon his arm, and he gladly halted his progress.

Another eternity passed as he stared out upon the surge of onrushing waters, and at the rise and fall of distant swells. Despite the Sword’s warmth, his bones were shaking.

“How do we summon Him?” he asked.

When he received no response, he turned to his companion, and found her wide-eyed and trembling as she, too, focused upon the sea. “With this,” she said.

Without looking at him, she reached within her cloak and drew forth the longknife he had seen her fondle but never use. He only glanced at it, at first, afraid to turn his eye from the ocean…but found his gaze whipping back.

“Where did you…?” he began, and could not finish.

“I thought you might recognize it,” she confessed, shifting her own gaze at last. His was fixated upon the thinness of the blade, the soft curve in its length, the way the moonlight glimmered upon its perfect edge. “The weapons he wielded, young Kylac, they looked something like this, did they not?”

Almost precisely. Kylac had carried one longsword, two shortswords, and an array of daggers and throwing knives. All had borne handles of wood and leather, complete with disc-shaped crosspiece. The grip on this blade was unremarkable—a tightly wrapped thong of hemp and leather. But the blade, so sleek and slender, with just a hint of pearl-like gleam…

“You knew,” he said, the words sharp with accusation.

“I suspected, based on your account of their strength, of where he found them, of Killangrathor’s demise.”

“Do you know why?”

“Killangrathor would sooner destroy himself than face them? Not truly. Though we may be about to learn.”

Torin frowned, finally pulling his eyes from the blade to find hers.

“It came from Him,” she explained, her gaze flicking toward the ocean. “A spine, from the body of Ravar himself. Given the Vandari as a means by which to call to Him in our need.”

A spine. Kylac had claimed to have found his in an isolated cove in the northern Skullmars, an ocean away.
Thousands
, the youth had said,
some the size o’ spears.
Torin himself had seen these weapons at work and had witnessed their unlikely strength.
I’s never even chipped one
,
never even nicked the edge of a blade.
Not against stone or demon or dragonspawn. No weapon of steel could be hammered so thin yet withstand such punishment. To envision the leviathan he knew wearing these as a saber rat wore its coat of quills…

“You might have shared this with me before,” he said, staving off a shudder.

“You did not seem much interested in speaking to me on this or any other matter,” she reminded him. “Nor is the mystery of Killangrathor’s suicide vital to our purpose here.”

Vital? Perhaps not. But after carrying that and other riddles around in his head for so long,
any
understanding was like a soothing balm upon an open sore. Knowing
how
and
why
things were happening helped him to feel more a participant in these struggles, and less a victim caught in their flow.

“It may not be so irrelevant to Him,” he cautioned, “if Killangrathor was truly the last of his breed.”

Annleia swallowed, and their heads turned as one, back to the pounding waves. The lesser wavelets continued to splash and churn about their ankles, drawing sand and pebbles from beneath their feet as if to root them in place.

“I suppose we must find out,” she said, a mere whisper against the roaring surf.

She brushed him gently aside, then took two more paces toward the sea. She bent carefully to her knees, cloak snapping in the wind, waves dragging at its hem. He saw her eyes close, and her lips move, murmuring as if in prayer. Slowly, she raised her left arm, clutching the knifelike spine by its makeshift grip, its tip pointed to the earth. When she could stretch no higher, her words stopped, and her eyes opened.

Her arm came down in a blur, blade streaking across the black like a shooting star. While Torin tightened his grip on the Sword, Annleia let go of the spine, leaving it embedded in a rock upon the stony shore.

The ocean roared, the wind moaned, and the earth seemed to shudder. Annleia glanced to the heavens, as if anticipating a bolt of lightning from overhead. But the skies did not answer, remaining pale and vast and empty. A series of gusts reached down to finger a narrow thong left hanging from the spine’s hilt, then unfurled it like a flag. When the breezes lost interest, they dropped the strap into the froth of an incoming wave.

Torin held his breath as if it would be his last. He no longer felt the biting cold of the onrushing wavelets. Like curious children, they curled and splashed around the implanted spine and the feet of those who had placed it there, then rushed back to speak of their discovery to the ocean that had spawned them.

The ocean did not seem to care.

Dread anticipation gave way to hollow relief. Perhaps the Dragon God would not answer their summons after all. So be it. They would find another way. Better that, he thought, than to have to face that monstrous titan again.

He was about to express as much to Annleia, when all of a sudden she stiffened. He felt her reaction more than saw it, an awareness through the Sword. His eyes saw well enough the rest.

In slow, steady motion, the entire sea seemed to heave, swelling as if to drown the horrified viewers. Annleia stood, and Torin rushed forward, thinking to grab her and flee. Then the waters parted, and from the ocean’s womb lifted a glistening black reef. As this submerged ridge continued to rise, rivers and falls cascaded from hidden crevices within its jagged skin. Looming above them, the reef soon looked to Torin like another cliff, another mountain, eclipsing the moon as it ascended skyward. Mercifully, it remained outside the cove, far too immense to fit within…yet still it rose, until suddenly, impossibly, the mountain’s underbelly was revealed—it, too, breaching the water’s surface.

Beneath, the ocean seemed to disappear, sucked into the void left by the creature’s emergence. And Torin, left far from the surf’s edge as the waters receded, wished now that he had drowned.

And so you shall
,
before all is done.

The words reverberated through his chest, through his mind. An inner voice not his own.

Waves of passion. Waves of torment. They will engulf your heart
,
your head
,
your lungs. You will choke and sputter and beg release as they crush and grind your soul
,
Asahiel.

The voice was thunderous and primordial and unrelenting. It gripped him like a giant fist around his rib cage. Ravar. The Dragon God was speaking to him.

An audible groan rattled the cliffs as Ravar arched His gargantuan form, bending His cavernous maw toward them. Though too vast to fully explore, His silvery, eel-shaped torso was armored in reefs of black coral and limestone. From these dripping cliffs hung forests of seaweed, along with countless creatures of rock and shell still clinging to their underwater homes. An entire world, Torin marveled, an entire world hidden from man had risen to greet them.

“I came as soon as I could,” Annleia snapped.

Her words startled him almost as much as Ravar’s had. At the same time, the defiance in her tone confused him.

Twilight descends
,
I told her. Yet only now does she summon
,
rank with fear and mortality. She is too few
,
too late.

He speaks to both of us
, Torin realized,
at the same time
,
yet independently.

An infinity of voices
,
an infinity of ears. Eleahim I am
,
Asahiel
,
and shall forever be.

Torin feared his knees might buckle as the creature’s stench washed over him. A stench of brine, of deep-sea growth and rot, of timelessness…Who was he to stand before such majesty? A worm. A gnat.

Less
, Ravar suggested. The creature’s head had settled so that it now walled off the cove’s entrance. Its eye, a black pearl too small for its body, fixed upon him, gleaming with depthless knowledge and boundless perception. Its gaze pierced him, impaling him with awe, riddling him with despair. In half a heartbeat, Ravar saw everything he was and was not, his every deed, for good and for ill—and was amused by it.

“Then it will cost you nothing to share what you know,” Annleia replied to some unknown statement.

She was trembling visibly now, despite her boldness. He wondered what exactly Ravar was telling her. He thought to put his arm around her, to comfort her, but could scarcely breathe, let alone move. His life, his struggles, his successes, his failures—all meant nothing. Only his blade, the Sword of Asahiel, was worthy of such a magnificent presence, and even it felt somehow inadequate. He could see now the hundreds, thousands of spines protruding from Ravar’s armored flesh, worn like stubble. A hail of Crimson Swords would not scratch the behemoth before him, could in no way mar its titanic surface. Holding the weapon even now, Torin felt suddenly foolish.

A candle in your palm
,
its power wasted
, Ravar agreed.
A boundless inferno nonetheless
,
waiting to be unleashed. Given a true wielder
,
its power could consume a form even such as mine.

Torin might have scoffed. Could a god lie? Would Ravar attempt to deceive him?

Deception
,
artifice—devices of the weak
,
tools used to grasp or shield. My existence is without need
,
without fear.

Even that, Torin wasn’t certain he believed. Annleia had described Ravar as a prisoner, condemned and shackled. Would He not break those bonds if He could? Would He not return—

My life endures
,
Asahiel. Were you not listening when Vandar told you?

Vandar
, Torin thought.
Annleia?

The Finlorian paradigm is rudimentary
,
but will serve. Balance. To keep me chained to this earth in physical form—even as an immortal—the Ceilhigh
,
as you know them
,
must divert a measure of my everlasting essence elsewhere. They do so constantly
,
eternally
,
to ensure my compliance with their chosen sentence. Mountains
,
winds
,
waves
,
and countless living creatures above and below this earth bear now my strength and my legacy. Anchors
,
yes
,
but each carries a piece of me throughout their lives
,
and I theirs. When one chain breaks
,
another is forged. I am both bound and unbound
,
forever.