Book 6: Chapter 33 - A Place of Smoke and Fire (RAW)

Deeper than the graves of the old gods lies a world brighter than any sky, yet hollow as a tomb—a night-bound vault where elder titans still roam in all their terrible splendor.

- excerpt from the Lavella Tablets unearthed from the Old Ruins in the Beacon Mountains.

In my old life, time leaked away in pinpricks—lost to a loading bar, to the late bus, a few more seconds shaved off by doors that closed just as you reached them. A thousand small thefts that, together, chipped away at my mortal span and hastened the coming of the grave. Here, in this fantasy land, the waiting came in days. The jungle still burned, and we waited for it to finish burning.

Some of that time I squandered in Estaza’s warm arms and nettled glances, but not all. Most mornings, I took Larynda to a beaten patch of earth at the edge of camp where the ground still remembered her fire. I carried only a heavy stick. She brought a leaf spear—its head keen and sharp, wooden haft protected by langets for half its length. I made a show of caution at first, as if the stick were a goose quill and her spear a viper; it pleased her to see me dance back, to think that she could push me so. She was young, and there was pride in her.

“I don’t see why I have to practice like this,” my ward told me once, her voice filled with certainty and youth. “If trouble comes, I will speak and blow them away.”

“Were I to push, you would have no chance to let loose a single spell,” I claimed, sure in my word.

“Yes, but you are a monster. Knowing this much is more than enough,” she said as she dodged one of my strikes, knowing full well that to engage in a bind would be futile.

“I think even my lessers would give you pause,” I said. “Magic is a weapon, like any other. Correct timing and measure are required for its most effective use.”

My ward looked less than certain of my claim, so I made a lesson of it.

I called the sisters. Marimae came with her hair in a high simple knot and her eyes narrowed in thought, Saranea with her hair in two braids that gave her an almost childish air. I set them against Larynda, minus, of course, the sharp spear. They would practice with staves.

The blonde girl gave the usual excuse that two against one was hardly fair. To this, I gave the clichéd answer that life was seldom fair.

They began in silence. The black earth was soft, yet firm enough; their feet slid when they wanted them to slide and bit when they needed to bite. Saranea circled like a wasp, feinting high, tapping at Larynda’s left hand with the butt of her staff, causing the girl to yelp. Marimae came straight, a steady drumbeat of rapid, testing strikes. The dark elf’s practice weapon pawed for the openings that good fighters pretend they do not have. Larynda’s first answer was all pride—two quick parries, a sharp step to her right, and she tried to snatch a heartbeat to breathe a word of power.

But Marimae’s twin stole it. The Saranae drove her staff crosswise and jammed it between wood and ribs, not a blow to break bone but enough to tangle thoughts and concentration. Marimae’s staff kissed the air where Larynda’s thigh had been an instant before. The half-elf cursed, not in any language I profess to speak, and gave ground.

“Again,” I said.

They pressed her. Saranea’s staff darted and nagged, nicking knuckles, rapping a wrist, wood against wood, ringing into song. Marimae’s practice weapon wrote straight lines, a series of thrusts. She did not chase; she herded. Each time Larynda tried to find that pocket of stillness where her magic could live, one sister filled it with wood. It was clean fighting, the kind that bruises only pride. 

Onlookers looked on. The camp did what camps do when lacking in entertainment—it watched. Men sharpening knives slowed their hands. A boy drinking from a flask forgot to drink.

My ward stood beside me, her mouth set in a stubborn line. “If I could cast a spell, this would be over,” she muttered.

“That is true,” I replied, “and that is why they will not let you. You are of the Silver, are you not? This should be basic knowledge.”

But excuses come easily to those who know defeat. “Yeah, but I always had someone… You know to do the whole ‘protect’ me whilst I focus on my Control.”

Larynda knew her staff work. She let Saranea have the bite she wanted—half a step too near, a guard a shade too high—and when the quick sister lunged to tangle her again, Larynda turned and slammed the haft down like a gate falling. The young woman’s staff skittered; the opening it made was not wide, but it was Larynda’s.

She took it as Enkidu had taught her. A short, ugly blow, the butt of her weapon cracking the dark elf across the shoulder to send her stumbling, then a heel ground into the black ash of the soil to anchor, then a long sweep to worry Marimae back two paces. Space. Not much, just enough to draw a full breath and shape it.

The very air changed. Control of Mana is a thing with weight when it gathers—like the hush in a hall before a person of power speaks. Larynda’s lips moved. No thunder, no blaze. Only a whisper as she formed two blades of Water that leapt. The twin blades cut through the hafts of the sisters’ practice weapons. Marimae had the sense to turn her face. Saranea did not. She swore and cursed, and that was the fight.

“Enough,” I called. “Well done.”

I made a note to see if Larynda’s attributes improved after a few days. If they did not, it would be a simple thing to push her some more. After all, I could not always be there for her.

They lowered their broken fragments of their practice staves, Larynda hers unbroken. The half-elven girl kept her chin high though her breath sawed, refusing to bow for air. Good, she had learned not to show weakness. The sisters, however, despite their advanced age, had not.

Saranea blinked hard, knuckles brushing the corner of one eye as if it were only dust. Marimae set weight to her staff and studied the scuffed earth, counting the places she’d gone wrong.

One of the sisters shook her head and uttered, “That was cheating.”

“That was living,” I said, before turning to Larynda. “Magic is a fine horse, but it bucks if you mount it wrong.” I took what remained of a severed stick, turned it in my hands. “All weapons have their optimal range. One does not use a knife to strike someone a sword’s length away. Your spells, Larynda, should only be used when you have enough resources for them. Time.”

I touched Saranea’s shoulder and poured the magic of Heal into her. It was yet another statement, a reinforcement. I did the same for her sister.

“Push her more,” I whispered in their ears, and I imagined I heard them shiver. But whether it was from my words or the lingering glory of my magic, I knew not.

Saranea blinked away the last sting to her pride and grinned crookedly at Larynda. “I see I will hit you twice next time, for the price of one.”

Marimae inclined her head to Larynda. “I overreached,” she said. “I will not again.” She looked to my ward then, eyes calm and filled with determination. “If I were your true enemy, I would not let you breathe.”

We worked until the sun found its anger and the day became too hot. With a fresh staff, I had put its butt into shins and ribs enough to make memories but not enough to do real damage; the sisters improved their form with me giving grudging instruction; Larynda had learned to make space, not by caution given, but by pain offered. Aggression, she soon learned, was a good form of defense. 

When my ward stepped into my circle, I pushed her to fight twice as hard, slowly increasing my speed with each traded blow. She cursed me for it, and later thanked me in the same breath without using either word.

And so, like this, the days passed in total peace. 

Damien de Savant had his Dragon of Mercenaries ready to move. It is no fast thing, shifting an army, even a small one of only a thousand. Wagons creaked to their teams. Men doused cookfires and shouldered heavy packs. There is chaos to the first moments—the missing boot, the lost whetstone, a curses’ litany for a misplaced helm—but discipline smooths it all and a form of order is found. Standards rise, and a marching order is formed. The men were eager to be on the move.

The long serpent of men, animals, and steel took its first slow, stubborn inches. It does not hurry, and it does not stop. There is a certain steadiness to it, a heaviness. An implacability.

For now, I did not pull the wagons today; my skills with mount and blade might be necessary at a moment’s notice. Instead, I rode at the very tip of the column, Larynda just behind me in case we needed to make the sky fall once again on our enemies. As for the sisters, they had bonded somewhat with my ward and rode on their lizard mounts, bows within easy reach.

Perhaps, I mused to myself, the sisters would have some use after all.

***

There was always smoke on the rim of the world. Larynda’s Black Flames ate as a true fire eats when the wind is kind—greedy, tireless, without a thought for what comes after. Surely there could not be much jungle left to feed them? Yet this world knew a certain truth that my old one had forgotten with the progress of technology. Scale. Scale of things so large that they boggled the mind. In the modern age, wonders, natural and artificial, had long learned to live inside a bright little screen you could hold in your hand. But here nature could run on and on, leagues upon leagues, a stretch of black without end that once was green. There was no hyperbole in these words, only facts. Thinking of my old world, I wondered what the carbon cost of burning so many trees would be, and then laughed at myself for the idiocy of such a line of thinking.

The men felt it too—the size of it, the devastation that Larynda had brought. Word ran through the ranks and back again, growing each time it changed mouths, as eyes took in the char and the smoke far beyond the horizon that even now still climbed into the sky. This was a deed to be told around the fires: how the Black Flames fell and the green hell burned, how Goblins and all their creeping kin were scoured away with their nests and nameless things. 

Men like to believe they were there when the events of the world turned. They like to believe that they were part of something significant.

We marched not surrounded now by white bone sand, but on soil gone crust-black and bitter. Already the first threads of green were thrusting up through the burn, stubborn as beggars, as if the jungle meant to take back what had been stolen from it. The rains Larynda called down, her answer to her own ruin, came most afternoons. The far skyline smoked, and not a day passed without a smudge of gray to point our way.

It made for a journey along the ancient roadway that had once worn an emerald cloak. Dull and kind. With the burn came a mercy: fewer biting things to trouble sleep, fewer fevers to carry men off. For that alone, Damien’s soldiers blessed my little Mage in their mutters, even as they looked upon her with no small amount of fear of what she was. But with fear came the seed of respect, a lesson that Larynda was slowly learning.

Days went the way of all days, turning into long weeks. Larynda’s attribute had improved, her Health and Stamina growing—my Identify told me as much, but I hardly needed the spell to see that. Her footwork sharpened, her castings came quicker still. The two sisters—light and quick, quiet and sure—pressed her hard, and though they still won more bouts than they lost, they had to work for the privilege of my grudging praise.

With the land so unchanging, an endless black with the first sprinklings of a much weakened green, it was easy to think we were only walking in place. Yet we were moving, and the proof of it rose by slow degrees ahead: a sawtooth of mountains smeared with their own smoke, a fire beating in their hearts and bellies. The Beacon Mountains, the vista spoke, were the home of the Dwarves.

Home to Durhit Coal, a once-companion and traitor. The name tasted of grit between the teeth. I had given him a promise of vengeance against his sister, and some promises burn cold and long. Blacker than any flame.

And this one, this one, I meant to keep.