The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) (23 page)

“Well that doesn’t sound so bad now,” Rosalee said with a shrug.

Grace thought that was the biggest understatement. In fact she thought the only thing that sounded good about that was that the well was going to be reset. She didn’t like the idea of having an unknown master, especially one that gave the Norns such pause.

D
alah had stepped into the room with acute apprehension tearing through her. She figured that she would die here this day; she didn’t consider that she might live, for that was not her luck.

The egrigor had formed out of the shadows of the arena, which, now that she entered it, looked much larger than it had on the outside. Impossibly larger, to be honest. Dalah knew that the egrigor would take the form of whatever Porillon had fashioned it to look like, and she shouldn’t have been surprised at what she saw. It was obvious from the shape the egrigor took that Porillon had expected they would come down here to rectify what she had done.

The form she had fashioned was that of a black shuck. It stood, in all its horse-like build, at the other side of the battle arena, the menacing tusks jutting up and out from the bottom jaw of its gorilla face glistening with blood. Despite the fact that it was the size of a pony, its body was shaped like a hyena, its cloven hooves tearing up divots in the stone floor of the arena. It glared at her with phosphorous green eyes, swirling their Chaotic fire within the depths of its sockets.

The effect wasn’t lost on her; it was supposed to daunt Dalah into feeling like she was staring straight into the eyes of Arael, because the black shuck was his second form.

“You don’t have any power over me,” Dalah said and made the symbol of the Goddess over herself.

“Shields will not work in here,” Dalah heard the voice of the Repository of Wyrd say. She felt shields go up around the room and knew it was more for the sake of those outside than anything else.

The egrigor stalked back and forth, growling in the laughing sort of way the black shucks did. She felt the wyrd that was more than hers, the wyrd that was part hers, part Grace’s, and part Rosalee’s, coursing through her in a tangled jumble up her back from the base of her spine. She shivered a little as it culminated at the base of her neck.

The wyrd she had been given was made up of earth and water, and so Dalah figured that if she merely added the strength of her own wyrd to those elements that she could do a lot of harm. Seeing how the Evyndelle was wood, Dalah used that first.

The roots she manipulated out of the Evyndelle and through the root-wall were so thick, so heavy, that she at first had a hard time getting a hold of them.

It took a lot of effort on Dalah’s part, but all the same with only a little bead of sweat on her lip she forced the other women’s’ wyrd up her spine, to the lemniscate, and down her arms. From there she flung out her arms with a cry of effort, and the thick roots burst through the wall of the arena with an ear-shattering boom. The whole complex shuddered.

Dalah nearly lost her balance, but in a moment regained her composure, and with a wicked twisting of her arms, her hands held like talons, her face contorted in a chaotic mask, she began twisting and wrapping the roots around the black shuck.

They merely passed through him, causing no harm, no obstruction, and no bother.

With a flick of its head the shuck summoned a force of wyrd so hard that it flung Dalah into the wall. The shields that had been put in place along the arena when she had come into the room crackled with power, sizzling on her back and rebounding her back into the center of the arena. Blood bloomed on her knees and palms where she skidded on them across the stone floor, and she stood with difficulty.

“I’m not as spry as I once was,” she said conversationally to the black shuck, but the bloodthirsty look on its face made it clear to the sorceress that it didn’t care. She used the time that she was talking to summon yet more power to her aid.

The water wyrd gleaned from Rosalee was different than the wooden one. The earthen wyrd felt slightly stiff, and almost as if splinters were traveling down her arms. This time it felt like extra veins had grown on the surface of Dalah’s skin, and were pumping the cold, wet wyrd through the new irrigations to her hands.

The wyrd didn’t hold long on her hands, and instead blasted out in the form of thousands of icicles. She felt the pain of the ice tearing through her hands, puncturing through her fingertips, ripping from the wounds already bleeding on her palms. The stigmata marking her as one of the Realm of Air flared as the ice ripped even through that.

The air was filled with thousands of barbs and shards of ice, all of which would have instantly killed anyone, but merely passed through the black shuck to thud menacingly on the wall behind it.

Then it was the beast’s turn, and Dalah had all she could do to block the attacks. He flung fire at her, breathed from his mouth in a great, jetting gout. She barely had time to pull up a wall of water, flinging it out before her, summoned from the air itself. It held its own before her, stopping the stream of fire.

The attack halted, and she dropped the water, which once summoned could not be vanquished. The water fell to the floor, wetting the stone, and running over her feet and the egrigors cloven hooves.

It laughed.

She barely had time to breathe before lightning was flying from the beast’s mouth; the same way he had breathed fire, he was breathing lightning.

The power responded in her before she thought of it. This was an element with which she was proficient, and the lightning tore up her back, gathering briefly at the base of her neck before tearing down her arms and flying from her fingers which were even now healing from the icicle attack.

The thunder that sounded from their joint attacks meeting and colliding in midair was violent, heavy, and continuous. It sounded for all the world as if a thunderstorm were raging under the Well of Wyrding, rolling out of the Otherworld to consume the Fate of Man inscribed therein.

The lightning from the beast was black, the lightning from Dalah yellow — when they met it was like red fireworks flared to life, igniting the walls of the root-room where the bolts reflected briefly before going out.

Dalah screamed with the effort of holding such an attack, and the black shuck was gaining every instant. She held out her other hand, adding the strength of her passive hand to the dominant, and her combined lightning attacks began driving back his onslaught.

She felt herself sliding backwards as she shot bolt after bolt at him. If the roots penetrating the arena made the structure sway, it was nothing to what their lightning attacks did. The complex literally heaved, rocking back and forth in the grips of the roots as if it were a swing.

Eventually the shuck broke off his attack, and her lightning penetrated him, blasting a hole in the wall behind him, giving her a glimpse of gray flesh and webbed feet as something swam past.

She didn’t stop to think about it, and instead summoned air to bear on her victim. As proficient as she was with air she had expected something, but when she enveloped him with it, hardening the air into a stiff, imprisoning ball around him, he merely walked through it instead of being held fast as most would.

Now she conjured fire down her arms, and the searing heat of her intentions followed suit. She brought the ball of fire out of each palm and launched it at the beast even as it circled her. Dalah turned to watch the black shuck, ball after ball being heaved from her hands incessantly. She scowled; nothing was working.

He caught a stray fireball in his mouth, and seemed to swallow it. He turned then and kicked out his back feet the way a horse would buck. The stone that was torn up by his kick began to roll her way, expanding and enlarging as it went. Not only was it growing bigger, but as it hovered slightly off the ground, it began to sprout spikes.

It took nearly all her effort to control Grace’s wyrd in a way that allowed her to stop the stone ball as it bounced directly over her head. She held it in place, a few inches from impact with her skull, and began to transmute it. Soon it was no longer a ball, but as she pulled and tugged with her wyrd at its edges and sides it became like a blanket. She tossed it back at the Shuck spiked side down, and it covered him like the blanket she had formed it into.

If it had been a corporeal form that would have harmed it, but it obviously was not, and in a puff of smoke it disappeared, only to reappear beside her, breathing yet more fire.

Dalah could not react in time, and the first bit of fire burned into her shoulder. She sidestepped with an agility she didn’t know she still possessed, and this time when she summoned the icy water down her wyrded veins she didn’t throw it up before her but instead straight into the face of the Shuck, snuffing out the fire as she did so.

Then Dalah had an idea. Egrigors were similar to golems in the aspect that they had to be created. However, the difference was that egrigors were of thoughts. He was able to disappear and then reappear because he was fashioned of thoughts, which meant that he was not really real at all.

Water ruled emotions, thoughts, psychism, all things mental. Dalah knew that the power Rosalee had given her would not be able to affect a thought form, but it would strengthen any wyrd to that end. Dalah thought long and hard, conjuring all the wyrd she could muster, tapping into the water wyrd Rosalee had given her. In an attempt to halt the egrigor, she used the roots which she had previously brought through the root-wall.

At the same time she cast out the earth wyrd, she cast out the water wyrd, and as she manipulated the roots to form around the egrigor she also infused it with the will to become physical and substantial. The effort to make it physical took both earth and water wyrd, but she managed it at long last. Before long the black shuck was bound by the roots and could not move. Its cloven hooves scraped on the stone floor, kicking up sparks as it squealed and flailed like a caught hog.

Dalah blocked out the sound and closed her eyes, for what she was about to attempt was more powerful than she thought she was able to accomplish. It wasn’t that she was trying to stop what Porillon had done, but instead she was trying to destroy it, which was something she could do, killing it by removing it from the world.

She fashioned a web of wyrd with her fingers, nimbly moving them here and there as if she were physically weaving a tapestry. The threads of wyrd fashioned together like a glimmering blanket of blue, green, and silver light. Dalah wove with skill, putting in all of her intentions.

First she had to block it from the wyrd which poured through the well, for she figured that was how it was sustained, not by the mind of the caster as most egrigor were. Then she had to slowly purge the thoughts that made it. She had to kill the egrigor by taking it apart, thought by thought. It was not an easy thing to do, or something she could explain, but Dalah knew without a doubt that the tapestry she was weaving in the air before her was going to work, was going to kill the thought that made the egrigor, and hence kill the egrigor.

When it was done Dalah stepped back and appraised it with a hand to her chin. Perfect. She loosened the roots which held the black shuck, and instantly it dove for her, its teeth bared. She threw the glimmering web at it with a sharp gesture of her arm as if she were literally throwing a blanket over the beast.

At the last moment she began to un-work the earth wyrd which made it substantial. The wyrd fell away a moment too late, and the claws of the black shuck, the claws she had made physical, tore through her midsection.

Dalah fell to the ground, blood pouring out of her, and watched the now incorporeal form of the black shuck writhing on the ground as it was un-worked, as it came to an end. As the web vanished, so did the shuck, but the power of the original egrigor remained. That she couldn’t destroy, and their wishes at the repository would build a new egrigor that anyone in the future who wished to sway wyrd would have to fight.

It was all Dalah could do to drag herself to the opening between the battle arena and the Room of Requisition, but eventually she made it, falling half in the arena, half into the room.

The walls thundered as yet another attack began, one that had nothing to do with Dalah, the black shuck, or their reverberating wyrd.