“Don’t be a fool and don’t take me for one,” Vadim snapped. “Six Mharog, even ones as powerful as you, aren’t strong enough to confront the Tairen Soul and hundreds ofdahl’reisenon your own. Besides, the Feyreisen’s mate is Fey born. Your touch would kill her. My men accompany you so that she will be returned to me alive. If she is not, rest assured you will continue your service to me in demon form.”
Azurel hesitated long enough to make Vadim gather his power, then he gave a lingeringly insolent bow. “It will be as you command.”
As silently as they had entered, the Mharog slipped away. Vadim sat as his desk for several long chimes, his fingers steepled.
Celieria ~ The Dahl’reisen Village 8thday of Seledos
Dawn broke over a beautiful land of lush forests. As the sun rose, pastel morning skies became vivid cerulean, bright and cloudless over a verdant countryside. Shining lakes and rivers teemed with fish. Flocks of birds soared above herds of pronghorns bounding through thick forests. Silver-horned Shadars thundered across open plains, while winged Aquilines danced over glassy mountain lakes, touching golden hooves and feathered wingtips lightly on the water’s surface in a show of aerial mastery.
A familiar roar sounded, and Ellysetta turned to see a pride of tairen race across the sky, fur shining in the sunlight. Dozens of juveniles flew with the pride, some engaging in mock battles, while others tested their wings for the first time beneath the watchful eyes of their elders. Attentive adults flew below and behind the smallest of the kitlings, ready to break an infant’s fall or snatch a weary kit from the sky.
The tairen flew north, towards the jagged volcanic peaks of the Feyls, where Ellysetta could see hundreds more tairen circling the updrafts around the smoking peaks and launching themselves into the sky from the labyrinth of caverns riddling the range.
She turned her eyes west, and there was Dharsa, a shining jewel of white stone and golden spires rising from the forested hills like a crown. Moored boats bobbed in the harbor, while others sailed up and down the River Faer. The city streets were busier than she’d ever seen them, thronged with thousands of Fey, Elves, and other races.
And there were children. Hundreds of children. Infants cradled in their mothers’ arms. Toddlers playing in orchards and gardens overflowing with starry white Amarynth. Fey youths gathered in the Warrior’s Academy and the walled courtyards of the Hall of Truth and Healing as robed elders instructed them in the ways of magic and Light.
The Feyreisen’s palace rose from the city’s central hill, and there in the courtyard outside the Hall of Tairen, stood Marissya and Dax and with them a tall warrior in black leathers who was idly scratching the ear of the brown tairen kitling at his side. Three other kitlings played in the Source-fed fountain while an adult tairen Ellysetta did not recognize perched on the golden roof overlooking the courtyard. As if sensing her presence, the young warrior looked up. Eyes like blue stars—whirling with the opalescent radiance of the tairen—met hers.
«Keralas,»she whispered, and the warrior—Marissya and Dax’s as yet unborn Tairen Soul son—smiled.
The whirling radiance of his eyes flashed, a blue star-burst that intensified to dazzling white light that blotted out her vision.
When she could see again, she was no longer in Dharsa. She was, instead, at Orest, and a Dark army stretched across the land like a blanket of death. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. Armed and armored, man and monster standing side by side, their eyes pitiless chasms of malice. At the head of the army stood the personal guard of the Dark Queen, thousands of once-Fey warriors, faces scarred, eyes black and merciless, their once-shining skins now a lurid, corpse white, utterly devoid of the warm silvery Light that had once suffused them. They looked the perfect vision of the unspeakable evil they had become.
The Dark Queen stood in the center of her guard, her scarlet hair piled high and threaded with ropes of black, selkahr jewels, her lips bloodred, her eyes death black, her skin white as milk. Her fell beauty dazzled the senses, an enthralling illusion that drew men to their deaths and masked the true horror of her Lightless soul. She was the Corrupter, the Light Eater, the Consumer of Souls, and in her wake red flowers bloomed like a trail of blood. Selgoroth, the flower of death, antithesis of the starry white Amarynth that bloomed in the steps of Fey women bearing young. Clusters of poison thorns hid amidst the Selgoroth’s scarlet petals, and the flowers’ black hearts exuded a noxious miasma of decay. Where Selgoroth bloomed, all other life withered and died.
Before the Dark Army, the last defenders of Light had assembled. Elves and Fey, shining silver and gold. With them stood the few mortals who still remained unenslaved—those who possessed enough immortal blood in their veins to resist the deadly pull of the Dark Queen’s consuming power. The shimmering amber and green and silvery blue bodies of Danae forest and water sprites. Aquilines and Shadar. And the last pride of the tairen—Steli and Sybharukai, Corus, Fahreeta, and Torasul, even the kitlings, so young their pelts were still plump with the soft, fluffy down of their hatching-fur.
The Dark Queen raised her arms and shouted a command that boomed like thunder across the field. Her army gave an echoing cry, and the earth trembled as they began to march.
The Queen spread her arms wide and leapt into the sky, shifting into a cloud of boiling black mist from which emerged a nightmarish creature. A tairen, or rather what should have been a tairen—just as a darrokken should have been a wolf. Furless, scabrous skin the color of dried blood stretched across the creature’s massive form. Eyes of whirling flame glared over a snarling muzzle, and black acid dripped from its razor-sharp fangs.
The monster screamed a challenge, and the tairen leapt into the sky to answer her.
«Elan, shei’tani. Ve leiliath.»Awaken, beloved. You are dreaming.
Ellysetta woke in a strange room, lying in a strange bed. The first gray light of dawn filtered in through a large skylight overhead. Linen sheets were draped over her bare skin, and a soft linen pillow stuffed with some fragrant herb cushioned her head.
Rain lay spooned against her back, one arm and one leg thrown possessively over her. His long, lean body radiated warmth, and one large hand cupped her breast. A broad, warm hand stroked down her side, smoothing over her arm, pulling her close. She turned her head to find Rain’s eyes half-opened, the irises gleaming a soft lavender behind their thick veil of black lashes.
“Another nightmare?”
“Vision,” she corrected. “I can’t decide which is worse—seeing the terrible things I could become, or realizing the visions don’t terrify me like they used to.”
Magic hummed in his flesh, and as they lay there, skin to skin, body to body, she realized the faint vibration of her own magic had altered to match his, forming a subtle harmonic balance, a completeness she’d never noticed before. It was as if the energy of his magic flowed into hers, and hers flowed into his in a natural communion. Even their heartbeats and their breathing had settled into a synchronous rhythm.
As the haze of sleep faded, memories flooded in. The missiles that had shot Rain from the sky, their race for escape, the Mages with theirsel’dor,death so near… She rolled over to face Rain and found him awake and watching her, no sign of injury on him.
“Rain, what happened to us? Your wounds…” She laid her palms on his chest, sending her senses inward, but if there was a single grain ofsel’dorpowder still left in his body, she could not find it.
He laid his hands over hers. “Gone,shei’tani.There is a hearth witch here with strong healing talents. She tended us both.”
“Where is ‘here’?”
“In thedahl’reisenvillage in the Verlaine. Do you not remember? “
“Vaguely.” She recalled only snatches of last night, hazy images of scarreddahl’reisen,children, and a woman with white hair. “If we’re in adahl’reisenvillage, why don’t I feel them?”
