Hyden opened his eyes and blinked away the dizziness. A glance around told him that he was back in bed in the Afdeon apartment. As the memory of the dwarf’s death, the young green dragon, and the finding of the Tokamac Verge all came crashing back into his head, he jumped up in alarm. It was a mistake. A thunder clap of pain exploded behind his eyes, taking his breath from him.
Now sitting on the side of the bed, he held his head in his hands and gasped for air. The feelings of darkness and imminent destruction that plagued him on the trail were mostly gone. Only a deep clot of unease remained; that and pain.
“Take it easy,” Corva said from a chair in the corner of the room.
“How long have we been here?” Hyden asked with wincing concern.
“Only a few hours,” Corva said. “The sun has only recently set.”
“Where’s the crystal?”
“There.” Corva pointed to a small table along the wall. The crystal sat shimmering next to a single candle that flickered there.
“It magnifies more than magical energy,” Hyden said. “It took my fears and worries and compounded them until I was overcome.”
“When I took it from your pack at the teleportal, it did the same to me,” Corva said. “It showed me a hundred possible ill fates that Princess Telgra, Dostin, and Phen might have shared on their way to the Evermore. Luckily, I let Jicks take it from my hands.”
“Who took it from his?”
“Well, it seems that Jicks has a more positive outlook. He's not worried about much. The crystal magnifies his pride and his hunger. He hurried the Verge in here then marched through the kitchens to find some food.”
“We’ve got… I’ve got to get it to Xwarda.” The pain behind Hyden’s eyes was ebbing away. “I’ve got to get the High King to Xwarda, too. It will take him, Ironspike, and the power of the Wardstone, along with that crystal, to do what I must do.” The thought of all that raw magical energy in one place made him shudder.
A low, rumbling sound, a tremor of vibration, shook the room. Hyden looked up with alarm all over his face. “It’s coming,” he warned. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did. He could feel the nauseating presence of demon kind. Through the open door, Talon came gliding in from the apartment’s common room. The hawkling felt it, too.
Shouts of concern came from beyond the door, then a long, loud scream came from outside the shuttered window.
“By the Heart of Arbor! What is it?” Corva asked as the structure shook again.
The low, popping sound of fracturing rock threatened to drown out the elf’s voice.
Hyden began pulling his over clothes on in a frantic rush. “Corva, find Cade, or Durge!” he yelled. “We must teleport as close to Xwarda as we can and then ride like the wind. The fate of all the races depends on us defending the Wardstone.”
Corva darted out. After getting both boots on his feet, Hyden grabbed the Tokamac Verge and cast a sending spell to Master Sholt. The magnifying power of the Verge amplified the message so that it exploded into the mind of every wizard and mage who was anywhere near Master Sholt. When he was done, he spoke a few words to Talon and opened the window shutters. The hawkling cooed a quick goodbye then took to the air in a flutter of wings and determination.
The lift moved so slowly that it made Hyden angry. When he stopped on the floor where the teleport symbols were, he was in a determined rage. Afdeon shook again, only this time the movement was jarring. A pair of stoneworked sconces fell from the wall, and part of an arched doorway cracked and crumbled apart. There were a dozen giant soldiers gathered near the teleport symbols. One of them stumbled and fell into it like it was a gaping hole. Hyden reddened into an anger bordering on disgust and contempt.
“Put down the crystal, Hyden!” Corva yelled.
The elf and Jicks came rushing over from the void of blackness where the teleport symbol used to be.
Jicks took the crystal from Hyden’s hands and almost instantly Hyden’s anger began to abate.
“If you’re going to carry this thing, Hyden,” Corva said, “you must calm your mind and focus on what emotion is most beneficial to us.”
“If we cannot get to Xwarda anytime soon, there is no need for that thing anyway,” Hyden said. His rapidly decreasing anger carried him into a state of confusion for the moment. He tried to think of what he could do, but his mind was a swirling blank.
Suddenly, a chittering roar, like nothing any of them had ever heard before, erupted from the hole in the floor. A long, black tentacle lashed up out of the blackness and wrapped around one of the giants’ legs. It yanked him away from them, then in the span of three heartbeats, a grotesque insectoid head peeked up from the hole. A pincer, not unlike that of a lobster, shot out and snipped the entangled giant in half.
Hyden realized that the teleportals were useless. Already another demon beast was crawling out to join the first in its attack. Xwarda had never seemed so far away from him, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to form a complete thought.
Weapons were drawn. Shouts and commands erupted, and Jicks thrust the crystal back into Hyden’s grasp. The young solider was charging toward the first demon beast while drawing his weapon. Corva began loosing arrows at it, but they did nothing. In that brief instant, the clouds in Hyden’s mind parted. He had a moment of helpless and terrified clarity. Another giant was snatched and torn to pieces before his eyes. With his free hand, he reached for the medallion hanging around his neck, and with all his concentrated power he called out to Claret.
Lord Revan kicked his cousin Matern’s head across the snowless area in the clearing. Where it rolled to a stop in the moonlit snow beyond the circle, a small black stain spread below it. A thin cloud of steam rose from the fresh, warm blood. The old elf’s body fell forward and Dieter Willowbrow was forced to watch the almost purple life fluid pump from the stump only a few feet away.
Dieter’s hands were bound behind his back, and a dozen Redwood sentinels stood around him alertly with swords and bows drawn. They were ready to kill him at Lord Revan’s command. The head of the Hardwood Coalition had gone mad after his grandchild was born prematurely. A dead black thing that vaguely resembled a baby had taken its mother’s life when it came out. Lord Revan’s son had cursed his blasphemy and then taken his own life in the Arbor Heart. The entire Evermore, and the outlying groups of elves around it, had all gone half mad it seemed. The Queen Mother’s orders were followed by most, but ignored by others, and in a matter of hours a civil war among the elves had begun.
Lord Revan slung his cousin’s blood from his blade and took up a swinging stance before Dieter. Dieter hoped that his father would come to save him; he was due back from his hunt anytime now. He would put a stop to this madness. Willowbrows might only be archers and hunters, but they were respected among the older elves.
Seeing that his time was now, Dieter closed his eyes and prayed to the Arbor Heart that Revan’s blade would kill him instantly. He didn’t want to suffer. Once the prayer was finished, he did what he could to make certain that the stroke was well swung.
“You’ve already killed your grandchild and your son, you old fool,” Dieter said with defiance in his voice. “You’re a kin killer, lower than the roots of the festering. You may take my head, but worm rot and drought have already plagued your soul.”
“Die!” Lord Revan spat as he began his swing.
“Stop it now!” the Queen Mother yelled from the tree line.
As if to punctuate the powerful anger she felt over what she was witnessing, the ground and the trees around them shook for an instant. Only the swift action of a young sentinel who had listened closely to Dieter’s words stopped the blade that was swinging at him.
The raging elven lord spun his deflected blade around and squared off, facing the Queen Mother’s approach. He was standing in the dead center of the lifeless circle, and the forest clearing had gone suddenly silent.
“You’d kill me, too?” the Queen Mother asked. Pointing at Dieter she ordered, “Unbind him now.” Dieter saw that, a few paces behind her, Varial Teak was leading a group of Willowbrow archers into the clearing. Dieter’s father wasn’t one of them, but he was nonetheless glad to see his cousins and uncles.
The Redwood sentinels untied Dieter and he ran stumbling toward his family. He was careful not to get into their lines of fire. All of them had their arrows trained on Lord Revan.
As the Queen Mother stepped into the blackened circle with the Redwood lord, the ground shook again, only harder. Several of the Redwood sentinels stumbled, and a few of them took a knee, bowing to the power of the Queen Mother’s wrath.
The Queen Mother hesitated. Dieter could tell by her expression that she hadn’t caused the quaking boom. Lord Revan started his swing, swift and sure, but it never found her flesh. Below them, the ground fell away into an empty nothingness. Four sentinel guards, the Queen Mother, and Lord Revan fell tumbling into a hole.
The next thing Dieter knew, a Choska demon came shooting up out of the hole. In its claw was the broken form of the Queen Mother. In its jaws was half of Lord Revan. Behind it, like a swarm of ants coming out of a disturbed mound, was an army of hellspawn. Malformed humanoid things, part beast, part insect, began to attack. They were armed with tooth and claw, stinger and talon. A pair of hellcats came flapping out, all scale-covered blackness, like panthers with thumping leathery wings.
Unlike the other slack-jawed elves around him, Dieter snatched a bow from one of his cousins and put an arrow into the breast of a wyvern. The beast came crashing down out of the sky. The battle for the Evermore was underway.
Princess Telgra’s heartfelt wail was accompanied by the gasps and moans of the elven members of her escort. Only moments ago, Phen had told them that Hyden Hawk had made a sending so powerful that it rattled his skull.
“Defend the Wardstone with all you have, Mikahl! Go, do it now!” Phen told them. The message, when he’d repeated it, got snickers and snorts of disgust from the haughty elves of the delegation. Now, Phen saw that something was affecting them, too. He only cared about Telgra, though, and her saddened, tear-streaked face tore at his heart.
“What is it?” he asked carefully.
“The Queen Mother, my mother, just died.” She paused her step and looked up at the sky for a moment. “I am the Queen Mother now.” Her voice was full of regret.
A power she had only been told about began filling Telgra. The love and pain of all the hearts of the elves in Arbor were transferring from her mother’s wonderful soul to hers. Phen was left as an afterthought, as not only the spirit world of the Arbor went through the changes, but the physical as well. Telgra shuddered and wailed as the power filled her. A breeze picked up, whipping snow from the branches of the evergreens that stood among the leafless oaks and elms. The wind carried a moaning sound. The elves of the escort took a knee and bowed to Telgra, but she didn’t notice. Her wild yellow eyes were full of love and fear. Both terror and triumph manifested in her gaze, but then a different emotion took reign and her brows narrowed fiercely. In a voice full of menace she spoke.
“Get up! We must move like the wind.”
She started into a brisk jog. Arf, the great wolf Phen was riding so that his malnourished legs wouldn’t slow them down, took off after her, as did the other elves of the escort. Dostin’s great wolf mount, Yip, kept a steady, padding pace with them, too.
“For all of you who disregarded Phen’s warning as human folly,” she said with contempt in her voice, “you should feel ashamed. For if the elven mages who heard the warning had listened to Hyden Hawk’s words, the Queen Mother might still be alive.” She paused only to see that all of her escort could hear her words. “The demons we chose to let the humans battle alone are back in force. Elven arrogance just might be the cause of our own uprooting. The Evermore is under attack.”
In her mind, Telgra sent the command to gather and fight to those elves closer to the Arbor Heart. The few anguished responses she received told her that the enemy had already overwhelmed them. Through their eyes and emotions, she was nearly stopped in her tracks. The elves of the Evermore were being cut down like wheat before a scythe.