“No!” Qurrah screamed. “This isn’t you. This isn’t who you are! You’re not a puppet. You’re not their slave!”
“With a thought,” Tessanna said, her voice deep yet strangely hollow. “I sense it, Qurrah, that city of gold and pearl. Everything to follow, I can crush right now. The seed must be ripped from the soil. The world must be spared from what comes next.”
“No, damn it!”
Qurrah rushed her, demanding her presence, refusing to wilt before the tremendous power he sensed building within his love.
“Remember who you are!” he screamed up at her. “You don’t have to do this. You aren’t evil. You aren’t the destroyer. Let it go, Tess. Let it go!”
She continued staring north, seeing things that were far beyond his sight. Her outstretched hand trembled, and the ground trembled with it. Tears ran down her face, and her lower lip quivered. The empty look on her face then changed, replaced with terrible sorrow.
“I can stop it,” she said, her voice more her own. “Please, Qurrah, let me stop it. Let me destroy while I still can. Mother wants me to bring back the darkness.”
“Never again,” Qurrah said, feeling his heart pounding in his ribcage. “Let it all go.”
Her arms curled around her chest, and she bent over as if she’d been stabbed in the belly. Her wings fluttered, flared out wide, and then exploded in a frantic eruption of fading feathers. A scream tore from Tessanna’s very soul, and she arched her back, her head snapping violently from side to side. The dress of stars and darkness vanished, replaced by her own. And then she fell.
Qurrah caught her in his arms, collapsing onto his rear beneath her weight. Cradling her, he cried, rocking back and forth as he clutched his beloved to his chest. Time resumed, as if the whole world had paused to witness their spectacle.
“No more,” he whispered. “No more. We won’t play their games.”
Tessanna’s eyes fluttered open. When she looked up at him he saw love in them, and he nearly broke down again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, pressing her face against his robe. “I’m so sorry.”
She cried, and he held her, and all alone they endured.
22
By day the orcs lurked in the distance, baiting them, daring them to separate their numbers. By night came the raids, never at the same time, and never from the same direction. It was enough to drive Tarlak mad.
“We’ll never make it to Angelport,” he said as he stood in the center of their enormous camp beneath the blackened sky. “By Ashhur, I don’t even think we’ll make it halfway.”
Sergan stood beside him, shaking his head as a cry of alarm came from the south, the third in the past hour.
“I’d celebrate just making it another day,” he said as they ran toward the call. Tarlak knew it’d be over before he got there. It almost always was. They arrived amid the confusion, with dozens of soldiers readying swords and shields. All around were their tents, gaping holes in the tops, many with spears still jutting from the fabric. Despite the commotion, no combat took place, the orcs having already fled.
It took little time to find out what happened. Orcs had taken out the guards with arrows, then a large group had rushed the camp, throwing spears from a distance before retreating. All in all they’d lost only seven men, but that wasn’t the raid’s purpose. The men were afraid to sleep, constantly roused by their hit and runs. By day they marched in a desperate attempt to reach Angelport, and by night they suffered the raids.
Tarlak looked to Antonil’s large tent in the distance, feeling like there were stones in his gut.
“We won’t make it,” the wizard whispered as a fourth alarm sounded from the north. “You damn fool.”
The following morning, Tarlak sat before his tent, legs crossed beneath him, and ate his meager gruel. Normally he’d have whipped himself up something more appetizing via magical means, but his supply of topaz was low, and worse, he didn’t want to feast so fine in front of all the other exhausted men. It’d been one thing on their march out, well-supplied and in good spirits. Now, though…now he ate the mush and wondered how long it’d take before he opened himself a portal and fled west.
Despite his odd garb and reputation as a wizard, Tarlak tended to be on the popular side, but not that morning. No one wanted jokes. No one wanted anecdotes and stories of faraway places. So used to his newfound privacy, Tarlak was surprised when Sergan plopped down before him, his own bowl of food in hand.
“At last,” he said. “I thought I’d never get to eat.”
“You here for company?” Tarlak asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Here hoping no one thinks to look for me next to the oddball wizard.”
Tarlak shrugged.
“Fair enough. I can cast an illusion spell over you if you’d like, turn you into a buxom lady. Should buy you at least an hour.”
Sergan said something indecipherable with his full mouth. Tarlak assumed it was a colorful way of saying no.
“Suit yourself,” he said, leaning his chin on his hand and looking to their destination. In the far distance was a set of hills, and once they crossed over them it was nothing but flat grasslands until they reached Angelport. Hunting would go down, hurting the army’s already dwindling supplies. Tarlak tried to think of an upside, got nothing. So he set his bowl aside and watched Sergan eat.
“We need to change his mind,” he said.
“Good luck,” Sergan said, wiping at his beard. “I’ve never seen him like this. Even when we were fleeing the war demons he was never this determined.”
“What set him off?”
Sergan wolfed down another spoonful of gruel.
“I don’t like to say things I don’t know for certain, especially about my king. But if you were to press me, I’d say pride. All those years ago, we were running for our lives, doing everything we could to hold together and protect our people. But now he’s a king. He’s got a legacy, he’s got tens of thousands of soldiers. Lords have been hanging all over him, and his reputation in Mordeina is in the shitter. He wants this, he needs this. To go back home unable to capture Veldaren a second time…”
Another spoonful.
“I think he’d stomach this gruel better than he would that bad a failure.”
Of course it’s pride, thought Tarlak as he let out a sigh. Pride, the one thing that couldn’t be reasoned or bargained with. He looked to the hills, trying to convince himself that Angelport really wasn’t that far away. A faint speck made him frown. He cast a spell to improve his eyes, making them sharper than an eagle’s. What he saw made him curse well enough to impress a veteran like Sergan.
“What is it?” he asked.
Tarlak enhanced the spell, and only the sheer audacity of the attack kept him from panicking. In fact, it left him vaguely amused.
“Get the men ready for battle, now,” he said. “I’ll keep us alive until then.”
“Keep us alive? What in Karak’s hairy codpiece do you mean…”
And then the first dozen stones catapulted into the air from the far hillside. While Sergan swore up a storm, Tarlak summoned his magic, his mind racing for a solution. A magical shield would endure too much strain against so many, especially with both the weight of the stones and the enormous space he’d have to cover. Shattering each individually would take too much time. Wind would do nothing. That left him one option: smacking them right back.
“Out of the way!” he shouted, and ripped chunks of the ground around him. Hoping he didn’t accidentally fling one of the soldiers with them, he hurled the pieces into the air, doing his best to track the downward velocity of the enemy projectiles. One after another he threw them, the mid-air collisions shattering rock and dirt across the hillside, with much of it raining down upon the army. Still, far better they be pieces of broken stone than ones the size of a tent. Of the twelve, he stopped ten, and he did his best to ignore the casualties the remaining two caused as they crashed through their ranks with unrelenting speed.