Hya never mentioned the powers of creation she had seen Ellonlef use to heal Kian, but Kian had noticed a curious gleam in her rheumy eyes every time she looked at either of them. Of course, he knew what she suspected was in fact truth: he and Ellonlef held within them the powers of creation, as did Hazad and Azuri, though they did not know it, not yet. Peropis’s words rose to the surface of his mind. “A new age has dawned….” He suspected that the all the world had been washed in the powers of creation. He could not guess who or how many these powers had sank into, but in time those who had been touched by those powers would learn of them. As was the way of things, some would wield their newfound powers for good, others for evil, and in time a new order would be born from the ashes of the old world.
His thoughts turned as he gazed into the sluggish gray-brown waters of the river, choked with growing floes of squealing and scraping ice. Doubtless, the surface would soon freeze solid. Farther south, those thickening waters held the corpses of thousands of Aradaner soldiers and various highborn, men and women who had stood with Varis, against their will or not. Sharaal had ordered their limbs torn from their bodies, the wounds cauterized, then commanded them thrown screaming into the river-at least, that was one story Kian had heard. As it was the gentlest tale of them all, he chose to believe that one in particular, understanding full well that King Sharaal would embrace the more monstrous tales of his brutality, using them to further his own ends.
Kian feared there would be trouble with Sharaal and others like him, for in times of tragedy bent men always rose up to exploit the weak and fearful with false hope. A battle, he reasoned, had been won against Varis and Peropis, but without question an insidious war had come on the world in the form of destruction and loosed demonic spirits. At the moment, he could not guess who would ultimately prevail.
“Well?” Ellonlef insisted playfully, having no idea what Kian had been thinking about.
Shaking off gloomy thoughts, he gazed at her, enraptured, willfully falling into her dark, liquid eyes. At the moment, there was no need to dwell on Sharaal, or what the burgeoning age might hold, or what the powers of creation held inside him might mean-the same powers he had transferred into his friends when he returned their lives to them. All that mattered now was in front of him.
“Winter?” he muttered, playfully putting on the face of a doddering magus. “Dear one, winter it will end when it always does, with the arrival of spring.”
She rolled her eyes and laughed a girl’s delighted laugh. Azuri and Hazad, at the head of a string of pack horses, added their mirth to hers. Kian-who as child had avoided Kelren slavers and survived vicious cutthroats on the streets of Marso, who had grown into a man and a mercenary to fight innumerable battles, a man who had survived the shattering of the world and witnessed the loosing of the mahk’lar from the Thousand Hells, a man who had stood firm against a diabolical youth with the powers of gods-found himself laughing as well.
For the first time in many long days, he felt absolutely alive and whole. Laughter, shared as it was with lifelong friends and the woman he would wed, drove back the cold and threat of coming hardships, left him as warm as if he were tucked away in a cozy home before a roaring hearth fire. Such was his simple hope, and in that hope he rested.