“Why now?”
// Because we're passing out of the storm-it's a barrier around their island. I can see the break in the clouds from here. //
The swift, cold water carried them toward the break so quickly that by the time Thalnarra completed her sentence they were breaking into a patch of open sky. Vidarian staggered forward as the water itself grew abruptly still, nearly pulling the oar from his hands. He stared blankly over the opaque, glossy water that seemed to have no depth as it reflected a sky that had no clouds. It took several moments for him to realize that palpable in the air was another stillness, this one strange: Thalnarra's mind, over the course of his time with her, had developed a certain “static”; he found that he could sense when she was nearby. No more-she hovered on the wind, wings beating regularly to keep her aloft, but the presence of her mind was far astray.
Then-
// Wait…I'm losing it…brace yourself- //
“For what?” he shouted, then winced at the booming volume of his own voice in the silence; he was too long accustomed to the thunder of the waves. But Thalnarra was gone.
Stars spangled in front of Vidarian's vision as if he'd taken a massive blow to the head. A strange whiteness clouded his eyes, and he blinked rapidly, raising arms that did their best not to respond.
“Vidarian, I'm so sorry.”
A shape clothed in golden silk gradually resolved to his left. Endera was seated next to him in a silver-chased mahogany chair. Her large green eyes were tight with grief and sympathy.
“Priestess?” Speaking sent lances of pain through his dry throat and caused his head to spin.
“Ssh, don't speak. You are safely returned to the temple now and in the hands of the Goddess.” Her hand on his shoulder was cool. He shivered.
“Ariadel-“ Vidarian choked out her name, hoping it was recognizable. Endera's brow contorted and she looked away. Her voice came as though from a great distance.
“Lost. She was lost. And before we even sent you from the Temple. We couldn't call you back in time, and when our forces could finally reach you, you were caught in a Vkorthan mind-trap. Their silisva had you ensnared in-”
“Their what?” Each word seemed to cost him more, but the priestess's words hammered him. Ariadel was dead? Loss, profound and blinding, swept through his veins like black oil in a stream.
Endera paused and looked at him, hard. “The silisva. Surely you remember.”
Anger sparked somewhere deep within him; it fluttered like a moth, but grew wings of flame. Though his throat felt filled with broken glass, he spat at the priestess, “You said…knew nothing about the Vkortha. You said Ariadel told you nothing…to protect…Temple.” Grinding out Ariadel's name set him back, but only for half a second, and at last he broke through the agony in his throat; the pain faded to numbness and he felt strength returning to his arms in a haphazard rush. He wrenched himself upright and took in the strange white walls that enclosed the small room. At first his mind boggled at the absence of any door-but then he blinked, and it was there, with the memory that it always had been. He turned in the bed, pulling cotton sheets into disarray, and threw himself at Endera, who leapt back like a doe. There was panic in her eyes.
“This isn't right,” he said, advancing on legs that were at once strong and in the next instant weak as water. “None of this…” he winced as his vision lurched, “is right.” Staggering sideways, he swept the silver-chased chair onto the floor. It clattered as it hit. “Sharli's colors are gold, not silver. No temple room would miss both a window and a candle.” He lifted his gaze to Endera, who was backing up slowly. “Your eyes are not green.” As he stared at the priestess, her eyes widened-and began to change color. They slid from green to turquoise to blue, and then through purple-but Vidarian had already turned away. He charged at the bare wall with a primal scream ripping from his lungs.
The ground swept away under his feet and he almost stumbled-but Vidarian Rulorat had never so much as placed a foot wrong aboard ship, and would not do so now.
The waves of the An'durin, green and deep, rocked the Empress Quest as her captain gazed out over the cloudless waters. It was an unnatural sea, they said-the An'durin suffered no living creature within it, save one, and so its waters were clear as autumn air. Shifting white sandbars were visible hundreds of feet below the glassy surface.
There was something he was supposed to remember…
Vidarian shook his head. An item left at port, perhaps. Some trinket his mother had asked for. He could find her another; ports dotted the shores of An'durinvale like gulls on a pier. He could not turn the Empress around now, with the wind so full in her sails and the sky so ripe for conquest.
In the distance a pair of wings soared just above the horizon, shadows on the salt-chased air. A gryphon?
A smile parted Vidarian's cracked lips at that. The sour salten breeze dried his teeth. A passing sailor saw his expression and paused, smiling hesitantly back with a question in his eyes, but the captain only shook his head and gestured the man onto his duties. Thoughts of gryphons indeed! Next he would be thinking of mermaids; gryphons were creatures of myth. He squinted to locate the creature in the air again-surely a wayward albatross-but it was gone.
Absently Vidarian pulled a brass spotting scope from his coat pocket and trained it on the horizon. He squinted-the waves had grown, tossing the ship to and fro on the swells. Thinking that it would pass, he continued to peer through the glass, but the waves continued to rise. Frowning, he re-pocketed the scope, just in time to see the first churning foam froth white off the Empress's port bow.
A Rulorat did not stagger, but Vidarian took a decisive step backward as the sole occupant of the An'durin Sea surfaced not two lengths from his ship, whipping the waters to a frenzy in her wake.
An'du, they called her-the sea was named after the great green whale that lurked in her depths. The top of the creature was white as the sand, lending her invisibility from above; three times as long as the Empress Quest, An'du had three sets of long, tapering fins speckled with white against slick moss-green skin. I remember you! The words whispered in Vidarian's mind, soft and strangely feminine. As she rose titanic from the sea An'du rolled to one side, fixing an eye the size of a dinner plate on the Empress and her captain. Phalanged tendrils of translucent gold flesh, kelplike camouflage from some long-forgotten home sea, trailed from her fins and spine, slipping above the water's surface as her huge torso slid sideways in the water. The great eye dilated, black rising against deep brown, and then pinned, sending a thrill of alarm down Vidarian's spine. There were legends about An'du-that the deadness of her sea was not her making, but man's, and she cultivated vengeance in her heart so black that it could kill with a single thought. But the sharpness in her one visible eye was not directed at him, focused instead at some point over his shoulder.
They do not know whom they trifle with, calling up your memory of me, she said, and Vidarian's head spun, not at the danger in her tone but at a sudden distortion of what seemed the very world around him, which bowed like a glass fishbowl. They think to trap you here! But then they think that all are as ignorant of their secrets as the priestesshood…. I do remember you. Then with one mighty push of her broad tail, she was gone-leaving behind only a voice that lingered painfully on Vidarian's thoughts-
And you must remember as well…
And he did. Visions of a lightning-cracked sea flashed before his eyes, weirdly juxtaposed on the serene waves of the An'durin. He clutched his head and screamed as images flooded his brain-a pocked crystal orb on a bed of velvet, a gold-chased mahogany chair beneath an alabaster window, a slender white hand slipping into darkness…
Blinded, he lurched across the deck, leaping over the bow as he reached it and flinging out his arms to embrace the green waters. The piercing cry of a raptor, far too loud to be an albatross, screamed over his head, melding with the song of a breaching whale that thundered in his skull-
He fell, long and long. The expected assault of the cold sea never came. He was a boy, standing at his father's side; he was a man, weeping at the empty bower of his mother; he was a captain, leading a battle-quickened crew aboard a black pirate vessel.
He was a man, holding in his arms a creature whose soul burned with white fire.
Suddenly his feet were back on the unstable but unshakably real surface of the gryphon basket, which had taken on an alarming amount of water. The real world engulfed him; every detail shouted its existence to his baffled senses. Only Thalnarra's triumphant shriek overhead brought him back into control, as she swooped low enough over his head to raise a wind that sent the falling rain blasting back onto the sea.
She did not speak, but arrowed off to the northwest, disappearing back into the storm. Magic glowed red at the tips of her talons, and she still looked near to exhaustion, but her wings took on a stronger beat when Vidarian waved to acknowledge her dive.
His time in the Vkortha's enforced trance had pushed him back out into the stormy whirlpool beyond the enemy's lair, but with a surge of adrenaline fueling his fury he fought his way back into their sacred circle.
This time, they were waiting for him.
Six figures robed in black stood in a semicircle just inside the perimeter of the cyclone that protected their domain. Their casual display of yet another intimidating magic made his heart skip; slippered feet rested easily on the still surface of the too-glassy water. His mind reeled, ready to battle another dream, but then the waves shifted, baring thin columns of ice that gave the lie to their illusion. Water magic? His own new sensitivity surged up, longing to study how they'd frozen the sea-but he did not need the sun emerald to know that Ariadel lay beyond them, fighting for consciousness-fighting to keep her life.
The attention of the Vkortha was fractured, but enough rested on Vidarian to make the six figures his entire world. Nothing they could have done would shift his gaze. But Ariadel's voice, hoarse with fatigue even as it spoke in his mind, could.
Vidarian, you have to get out of here…they're trying to get one last piece of information from me, or else I would be dead. More they can reap from your mind, and Thalnarra's-they search for her still, though her cloak has thrown them off! The web of their magic is everywhere…everywhere…. His mind spun again-he had not known that Ariadel could speak telepathically. But he worked to get beyond his shock and concentrate on her words-the last of which, and the insanity that touched it, percolated deeply enough to make his very soul quake. You must go, now!
“You know I can't do that,” he said aloud, trusting Ariadel to hear the words of his mind even as he stared at the still immobile figures of the Vkortha before him. The priestess, mad with fear and fatigue, continued to object-and Vidarian knew that the Vkortha were listening.
As they listened, and as they sent their minds questing outward into the churning sky for Thalnarra, Vidarian moved his hands behind him, slowly.
When his searching fingers found their targets, he was not slow. With one hand he drew his sword from its sheath, steel against steel singing even over the roar of the storm that surrounded them. As one the Vkortha stepped back, focusing the full weight of their formidable awareness on him as the clean steel-fireborne and rife with the spirit of Vidarian's ancestors-drew their magics like a magnet. As he had suspected, they'd trained their magics to strike any fire spirit that manifested nearby, the better to bring down Thalnarra the moment her shield slipped-not expecting that Vidarian's sword could provide a false target.
A wall of flame roared up around the edge of the Vkorthan island; Thalnarra had seen her opening. It would burn Ariadel-if it had a chance to get there.
Even as Thalnarra's defenses surged up around them, Vidarian sent his own awareness into the Rulorat sword. The torrential life force inside him, the storm that the sun emerald had only hinted at, poured down his arm and into the blade, becoming it. To his awakened senses, a coil of crashing water energy wreathed the weapon from pommel to tip. The burning light they now displaced flared as if living and angry, and Vidarian's chest threatened to collapse in on itself as the energies warred-he fought now, not just against the drilling eyes of the Vkortha, but to stay conscious under the weight of his own magic.
A second force welled up in him, something he could only call his own will, embodied. His teeth clenched, the bones of his grip went white around the sword, sparks flashed in his vision-and the energies obeyed him. Like chastened hounds, they suddenly bent to his mastery, weaving together, sealing the sword into a thing of living energy.
A cry of triumph and rage clawed free from his throat, and he was throwing himself from the basket before he realized it, into the embrace of the waves. Even as his feet tumbled toward the familiar shifting surface and the depths beyond, he snarled, a pure wordless denial of the forces claiming his body-and they listened. The waves stiffened, solidified-and when his boots met them, they held him, propelled him toward his enemies.
Another leap and he closed the gap. The sword with its woven energies met the enemy mage's defenses, crashing against them like waves breaking over ice. And like waves, the energies came rebounding back at Vidarian, pushing him backward. But his momentum gave him the advantage, and the Vkortha folded under the blade with an unearthly wail, its barriers collapsing and its body dropping into the sea.
The Vkortha dissolved into chaos. The five remaining turned and fled, each in a different direction, the seas freezing before them, waves sent rising up behind them in panicked last defenses. None made any effort to assist the others, and they were rapidly scattering over the sea and island.
From the sky, Thalnarra screamed a challenge and fell upon the one nearest her, bringing it down in a torrent of flame. But Vidarian knew they could not chase down the three remaining-one, at least, would escape, to warn its fellows and bring a renewed attack. Without thinking, he brought forth the etched orb of the amplifier from his sash. He raised it to his forehead, closed his eyes, and pushed.