Torches flickered in the distance, a ribbon of gold upon the shore. He had not expected to miss the warmth of fire so greatly. It was harrowing; The breath precious in his lungs. He realized, with regret, that he was sad to leave that world. And to have been undone by it…
The second man came forward, gripping the druid at the elbow. “… better off,” he muttered, his voice breaking the sanctity of the silence.
The druid glanced at him with tired eyes.Even this, they would not allow me.
He was propped upon the boat’s ledge, his weight tilting the skiff forwards. His toes gripped the wood in perhaps his last defiance. His shoulders wriggled, but the man’s hands tightened. And he heard it.
That voice…
Come to me.
The druid gazed into the water. He stilled, matching its unbroken veneer.
Come… to…
With a hard shove, he was propelled from his perch, and the water came up to meet him.
Upon breaking the surface, he gasped, and water poured into his throat. It dug into him like hooks, threatening to drag him down. The weight of the ornaments fought him, and even as his feet trawled slowly through the water, he could not keep his chin above the surface. He struggled against the bonds on his wrists, but the cold sapped his strength at alarming pace. The long, tangling strands of his hair soaked through, until every part of him was dragged, silently, into the black depths.
The druid had imagined his death often.
He dwelt on it fondly—the justice of returning his borrowed body to the land. He had thought, when the time came, he would welcome it warmly, but there in that moment, his fists clenched. His once gentle blood filled with violence, and his own desperate screaming ricocheted in his mind.
He did not want to die.
But the will and the work were quickly leaving him. The mere gripped him in its icy hand. He convulsed, but even that was muted. It was useless. He would never see his forests again. He would never walk free upon the green roads.
He sank… sank as if an anchor, weighted to the bottom of the world. Doomed to die in darkness.
Until…
The druid’s eyes opened to a radiant white light. He had stopped sinking, or so it felt. Around him, ghostly images rippled into being; an apparition of a thousand pale ships piercing the water.
Suddenly, he could see out over the land, as if a bird in flight, sweeping high over the moors. And the seasons shifted from Baine to Mírach, till all the world was ice and cold. The fields withered; the rivers strangled stiff beneath winter. Out over the sea, the wind howled, and he was flung towards it, carried into the heart of a great storm. Through and through he flew, until shapes appeared within the mist.
He gasped.
Water filled his lungs. The heart that had once slowed beat fast again. Looming tall around him were figures moving through the fog. Great-limbed creatures with eyes like frozen embers. They carried swords, they carried spears. His belly sickened with their hunger. Hunger for the taste of carnage. Their longboats crested over surging waves. As the firstship struck the shallows, the tide turned red, and in the carmine, he saw war.
The dead lay torn open in the mud. Fire clawed up stone and wood. He could hear the clash of iron and screaming. A chant hummed low across the night. The temple at Aghmuir burned, its columns falling to flame. The battlefield raged from north to south, the land awash with slaughter until the soil drunk of its blood. Bodies piled across sullied fields, arranged in strange patterns.
And at the center of it all, he saw him.
The Vaich.
Standing before a pyre, axe in hand, his body a ruin of blood. Behind him, the sun’s light guttered, and beside it, the moon hardened to cold stone. The light of the land was leaving, and so, too, did it flee the druid’s eyes as he sank deeper into the lake.
Why have you shown me this?he asked of the dark.Is this what the world shall become?
Even as his mind faded and his vision went black, he felt, with utter certainty…
He was not alone.
Skyre stood upon the shoreline.
The fire at his back did nothing to combat the bitter breeze biting his skin. He gazed out at the black lake. Anything that stepped within those waters would be dead within minutes.
“This damned frost,” muttered Greyv beside him. “If that doesn’t make a cock shrivel…”
