“Really? Between the two of us, you’re the less expendable one.”
“I’m also the one who can—” Every word he could say sounded like bragging. “Who might have some control over parts of all this.” Olvir gestured to the Battlefield, which shifted from green to white in the spot where he pointed, though he mostly thought that was only chance. “Which one of us is expendable won’t matter if neither of us can get through. Besides, if I disintegrate or explode as soon as I take a step inside, you won’t have to go the rest of the way.”
Ulamir spoke: troubled agreement.
“You’re both right, damn you,” said Vivian. Despite the profanity, her tone held no anger, only resignation. “Go ahead. Let’s get this over with quickly, whatever the consequences.”
It was his parting from Nahon again, with all the inadequacy of words to cover Olvir’s possible fate and how much he cared for those he might leave behind, but the worst case could be far more immediate. He and Vivian had no time for ritual goodbyes, either, as they stood on the Battlefield’s edge: Thyran clearly had some notion of where they were and what they were trying to accomplish. The wizard might well have been in direct contact with him, and if not, he would likely be aware of its death before long and draw the appropriate conclusions.
Olvir reached out and stroked Vivian’s hair, trailing his fingers down through the short, crisp curls. He could only let the touch last a few heartbeats before he turned away.
Then he braced himself, took as deep a breath as he could manage, and walked into the shining scar on the world.
He only took a few steps, venturing no greater distance than he could retreat if trouble started. Olvir had gone half that far before he truly believed that he still existed.
There’d been no explosion, no lightning bolt. The ground beneath his feet was unsteady, less yielding than sand but with an odd upward bounce that followed each step, but it was ground and it held. Olvir didn’t catch fire, he didn’t start dissolving from the toes up, and the air didn’t turn to vitriol against his skin.
His lungs ached, but that was to be expected. As slowly as he could, he exhaled, then inhaled just a little. The air smelled metallic, but it was air nonetheless.
Olvir, at least, could survive. He couldn’t sense the land shifting around him any more purposefully than it had been or any effort from the fragment to keep him alive where another person might have perished.
Conclusion, if a tentative one: the Battlefield wasn’t directly deadly to mortals.
He turned. Distance blurred and waved, but he could see light shining off Ulamir’s blade and make out the crouched tension of Vivian’s posture. She was ready to spring at a moment’s notice, Olvir could tell, whether to drag him back to safety or strike him down for the world’s sake.
He would have kissed her for both, had time allowed.
“I believe it’s all right,” he called.
It seemed necessarytocall, rather than speak at his normal volume, although he hadn’t gone far at all. Space was odd. Olvir’s voice came out oddly, too, catching crosswise echoes that faded some words while doubling the volume of others.Allwas longer than it should have been,rightcompletely disappeared.
Vivian heard him or guessed what he was saying. She crossed the few steps to his side, alert but swifter than he’d been.
“Well,” she said, “this…isn’t quite as awful as I’d feared. So far.”
“Disorienting, and it smells like a forge at noon, but if that’s the worst of it, the gods will have been very good,” Olvir agreed. “Can Ulamir sense aspects that we can’t?”
Vivian tilted a hand back and forth in the air. “He says it’s not really stone, which isn’t surprising. He believes it might have been actual stone before”—the gesturing hand swept across the scene in front of them—“all this, but it’s been reshaped in a number of different ways.”
“The Traitor again,” said Olvir. Peasant superstition overwhelmed knightly training as he stood with the world squirming in front of him. He had no wish to speak Gizath’s name aloud.
The sudden lengthy flow of communication from Ulamir to Vivian surprised him, as did her careful answer when it came. “Partly. But death is transformation too. So is healing, if the wound’s very bad. Love as well, I suppose.” She was staring off into the distance when she spoke. Olvir didn’t let himself try to read her expression. “And vengeance, for both the avenging party and the target.”
“This really is both of the gods’ handiwork, then.”
“Yes, as far as either Ulamir or I can tell without having actually spoken to them, and I’d really rather we not. In Letar’s defense, she probably didn’t do any of it deliberately.” A mound of…surface, Olvir supposed, as it wasn’t earth by any stretch of the imagination…rose in a scintillating bubble, then fell down. Vivian sighed. “And in complete fairness that he doesn’t ever deserve, I doubt the Traitor intended these particular consequences either.”
“No,” said Olvir. “Do you have any sense of which direction we should go? As far as there are directions here, that is.” He didn’t bother getting out his compass; he suspected it wouldn’t work. The sun was directly overhead, which corresponded roughly with the day, but he couldn’t count on it to move predictably from that position.
Vivian shut her eyes, grimaced, and pointed. “This way, and the quicker, the better. Ugh.”
They traveled as fast as safety allowed, balancing and rebalancing on ground that shifted with each step. It kept the odd buoyancy Olvir had initially felt for a few yards, then switched to dragging them down, so that simply raising a foot and putting it in front of another made Olvir’s legs ache. To the eye, the ground just in front of him and Vivian always remained flat, just as the place always smelled of heated metal, and the sun kept its position in the writhing sky.
All of it had been an accident. Olvir kept coming back to that.
That wasn’t new information—the Blades themselves had never blamed Gizath for willfully creating the Battlefield, and no story had ever faulted Letar for it—but it was unnerving to consider so close to the results. One god had acted, unthinking, in grief and rage. The other had knowingly given himself over to spite, pride, and his notion of what should be—but Olvir doubted he’d predicted what would happen after Veryon’s death.
He wondered how long the fight had lasted. No amount of time seemed long enough to mar the world forever.
