Home » Great Library at Hoeth » Book of Tales » Voice of the Phoenix » Voice of the Phoenix, Chapter Eight
| Voice of the Phoenix, Chapter Eight |
| by Calarion Sapherior |
“Regulus!” he shouted, his voice tinged with panic. “Eilinel! Eilinel, where are you?”
Howell’s booted feet splashed through brackish water, freezing cold as droplets rose and soaked his legs, sinking through the light cloth of his pants. Grey mist swirled above the brown water, so he could scarcely see his outstretched hand before him. And not a sight nor sound of his companions could be found. Vanished, gone into the strange claustrophobic mist.
”What is this place?” Howell whispered to himself in sudden fear. “Where am I?”
He stood still, the still brown water motionless around his legs, and howled into the mists again.
“Where are you?” he roared, and tauntingly his voice returned to him
are you...are you...you...you...
From his vanished friends, not a trace.
He screamed again, and again, until his voice became hoarse with the effort and finally grew faint and died, and still there was not a reply to his frantic cries.
The waters splashed around him as he fell heavily to his knees. One hand clutched at a small tuft of marsh-reeds, keeping him upright. Mud and dirty water stained him, his clothes, his face, his hair.
What now? He did not know what had happened, or what to do next. His friends, vanished, and he was all alone. He stayed there for a time, kneeling in the gloomy mire for time out of mind, until a new thought entered his mind. The Tear...no matter what had happened, he had to press on, he had to find the Tear of Isha. He dragged himself upright, marshwater streaming from his form, and staggered on through the water. So cold, so cold, and so easy it would be to remain there in the coldness forever, but the iron will that had driven him this far would not relent. The Tear, the quest, that was all-important, above even the whereabouts of his friends.
He hated himself as he thought it.
He staggered through the muddy waters, the thick grey mist whirling around him and whispering in his own voice, cursing him with his own thoughts about his betrayal, but he heeded not the voice of the mists that was his own and stumbled onwards, splashing through the waters. He fell, and felt dirt and grass under his fingers. A bank! An end to the horrible cold brackish waters and the heavy grey mist that seemed to fail before him, so he could see lines of grey-brown tree trunks of the great forests of Avelorn stretching infinitely before him. He clawed himself upright, his soaked clothes clinging to his chilled form, and broke into a weak run, forcing himself to go onwards. His strength seemed less now, and only the blazing power of his own will forced him to move between the trees, in pursuit of the dark elves again. Food or rest did not occur to him, nor did how one elf could defeat so many when he found them. His mind blocked all thoughts of this, or of the screaming of his tortured body. There was only the chase.
He did not notice the trees thinning, until suddenly through the last of them he could see a board grassy plain, and hear the sounds of a swift river’s water flowing rapidly. The Ardril! But his body did not match his mind’s joy at leaving the trees and coming at last to Ellyrion, land of the horselords.
Insensate, Howell fell to the ground and felt no more...
Something wet licked at Howell’s face, and feeling returned. It was cold and rough, and he moaned, moving away from it. Light streamed through his eyes, as he cracked them blearily open. Thoughts, and memory, were the last to return.
“He’s conscious,” the lyrical voice of an Asur said, and Howell twisted his neck, feeling pain run a course down his spine as he did. A young elf, smooth-featured and dun-tressed, held the damp cloth with which he had mopped Howell’s face a moment ago.
“So he is,” another voice said, and Howell winced. An image came to his mind, a tongue like a knife, with venom running down its blade to slowly drip off on to the ground.
“Lord Talaran!” the first elf said, shocked, and fell back a step. The elderly, long-faced politician came gradually over the supine elf, his terrible visage glaring down at him.
“You again,” Talaran snarled. “You weak, pathetic failure.”
Howell opened his mouth to speak, but the Chancellor cut him off. “I came north as soon as I heard the Tear was missing, and what do I find? The Tear has already escaped our grasp. They’ve taken it into the Shadowlands, and we’ll never retrieve it now. You! You pitiful wretch, you were here, you could have stopped this, you could have saved it! But – you failed. While you were curled up in a ball crying in the marsh, Regulus and Eilinel were already gone, continuing like a real elf would – unlike you.”
“Regulus? Eilinel?” Howell croaked.
“Dead,” Talaran grated. “They fought the druchii while you were wallowing in self-pity. Maybe if you’d been there, they would have lived. They’re dead, both of them, they were massacred because you failed them. You’ve failed everyone, you inept would-be prophet! Did you truly think the gods had chosen you, that you were some sort of Aenarion for this age? You failed everyone – your friends, your country, your race, your gods. You miserable wretch...”
Howell felt the strength flow from him in a sudden rush. Despair swept through his mind. He’d failed...the quest was over, and his friends were dead because of his hesitation and doubt and weakness...his body lay limp, as if the life were being slowly drained from it, for the horror had truly sunk in and he could not rouse the energy to speak. Talaran stared fixedly at him, a strange emotion of hatred and some other, more subtle and unidentifiable one clear on his face.
“You failed the voice of Asuryan,” Talaran sneered, “if ever there was a voice and not your own hallucinations.”
And then suddenly Howell was struck by the sense of wrongness that had plagued him all this time.
“How do you know about the vision I received?” he snarled. “And about what I did in Avelorn? What manner of sorcery is this?”
Talaran screamed in fury. “What matters it, failure, despised one, pariah!”
Now he had spotted the wrongness around him, Howell could feel it, pulsating, breathing, befouling everywhere around him. A shout broke the air suddenly; ephemeral as gossamer, and he could not make out the words, but the voice was Regulus’.
Focusing his will, internalising his emotions and fears and self-hatred, Howell sought desperately to penetrate the illusions. His breathing slowed, as he formed the image of a single candle flame in his mind and then fed himself into it. There was only the flame, and that was reality, not what was around him. Talaran screamed at him again, but the voice had changed – it was not the voice of the elderly elf, but something deeper and fouler and more guttural. Howell forced what his senses told him from his mind, near-desperately. He could sense in some instinctive primal way that this was no less a battle than any ever fought with swords and axes, and that his life lay no less in the balance here. Just the flame...just flame, and nothing else. He could feel some outside pressure frantically tearing at his mind, forcing him to return to the older images, and he fought against it, straining, feeling veins stand out on his forehead and sweat running a slow course down his face.
And then for a moment, there was something else, a new image, something come unbidden. An elfwoman, more beautiful than any he had seen before, her clothes ripped around her, bearing her breasts and thighs, her face hideous in its fear and hatred. Something over her, reaching for her skull, seizing it in massive taloned hands and clenching it into a fist until bone shattered and red blood and grey brain washed in a shower pleasingly over the hand, his hand. Two small children, quailing in fear as the bloodstained behemoth turned to face them and a serpentine tongue licked the blood of their mother from its hand, and then extended the same hand for them. Screams, and screams, and screams. A long tongue reaching out sinuously to caress the cheek of the she-elf brat, draping saliva over her cheek and mouth and body. An eruption of noise, the outraged bellow of something behind him. Turning, as barklike fingers strike him, spinning him around and flinging him to the ground. Trying to rise from the shattered body of the Everqueen, as the whirlwind of wood and leaves and fury hammers at him again, and again, until his skull bursts and daemonic brains ooze out and his form is still and his spirit sinks from the form and into the blood and ichor stained loam, tainting the land where Aenarion’s queen was killed forever, twisting and perverting...
And then Howell’s eyes returned to reality, to the brackish swamp and the mist, the Darkling Morass. Beside him, his companions, both affected by the same malign ensorcelment of the accursed grove. “Never...no...will not...!” Regulus screamed to the claustrophobic canopy, while Eilinel lay unmoving, her face contorted in a rigor of pain.
There was a noise, some terrible cacophonic noise like the screaming of chthonic fiends, and Howell’s voice joined it as the dreadful sound blasted through his eardrums and into his skull, even as he knew he heard the keening voice of the Darkling Morass that had failed to overcome him with its lies and deceit.
And then the brown brackish water exploded around him as the Darkling Morass attacked.
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