David Farland - Wizardborn

Was it a statue? Had it been alive? Or might it still be alive? A trail had been trammeled in the grass. The thing had certainly crawled to its resting place.

She drew her warhammer from her sheath, and tasted the air. Yes, the grass smelled sweet, almost honeyed, but lightning had struck. She could make out more burned patches—arcane symbols burned into the grass.

She walked around the circle and found thirteen runes—each different, each unknown, at equal distances. Deep hoofprints suggested that riders had combed this area. She could taste the scent of horses.

She tried to understand what might have happened. Someone had burned runes into the grass. Perhaps in doing so, they had attracted attention—a patrol. She could not tell who had killed the scorpion.

Warily, Erin stalked uphill toward the great tree. It was a mountain of a tree. A grove of normal trees could have sheltered beneath its boughs. Each leaf was as large as a knight’s breastplate, and a single acorn would have fit in a helm.

She had not gotten beneath the boughs when she became aware of distant sound, the grumble of thunder.

Erin wondered. She tasted cool moisture rising off the fields, but the air was not thick with the scent of water. The still heavens heralded no wind. Yet distant lightning split the night. She glanced toward the source.

The sky was black along the horizon for a dozen miles, blotting out the stars, as if a storm were rolling in. Tongues of flame darted in the blackness.

But it was no natural storm: funnels of fire appeared high up. By the flicker of lightning she could make out vast shapes, like enormous men with the wings of bats.

Erin had seen such a thing only once—when the Darkling Glory struck at Castle Sylvarresta. Now thousands of them streamed across the horizon in a flock. They were half a dozen miles away, closing fast.

Erin raced for shelter, hoping the vast tree would hide her as a bush might hide a mouse from the hawk.

It was no easy feat. The hill was steep, and as she sprinted, boughs overhead blotted out the starlight. It was nearly half a mile from the shade of the nearest limb to the deepest recesses at the bole of the tree.

The limbs rose high overhead as she entered the shadows. The pungent leaves smelled so strongly that Erin realized that she’d never truly tasted the scent of an oak before. Her feet thudded over the ground, muted by a thick carpet of decaying leaves. Darkness and cold reigned under the tree. Sunlight had not warmed the soil here for a thousand years. Under the vast tree, nothing grew.

Erin stumbled. Dry bones clacked beneath her feet. Fallen leaves had hidden them. She saw a greatsword thrust into the ground, a monument to a battle. The bones of creatures that might have been men lay all about. She saw the glint of bright armor, and a skull that was too wide of face to have been human.

Lightning struck closer, only a mile or two off by the sound of it. It threw stark shadows. Erin feared that it would show her up to anything that flew above. The cries of Darkling Glories sounded, an unearthly howling.

Erin ran deep under the great oak. The trunk was old, twisted, and no less than ninety feet across. Lightning flashed close to the ground, and a scream involuntarily tore from Erin’s throat—for in the stark light, she saw that the tree had a face: eyes and a wide mouth.

She drew to a halt and peered into the shadows, until a flickering bolt revealed the scene again.

The enormous trunk was old and wrinkled, bent in on itself. Moss and lichens covered the hoary thing. But someone had hacked away a face on its surface—a woman’s face. Her features were beautiful and unearthly. Her mouth was wide, as if she were calling out. Her open mouth led to a hollow beneath the roots of the tree.

Shelter. The mouth was a vast cavern twenty feet wide. She raced through the opening, tripped and rolled down a long hill. She landed, clattering among bones.

She smelled the musky scent of some animal’s den. The tree’s shadow had eclipsed the bright starlight. Everything was black, except when lightning split the sky. The heavens snarled. A tempest rose.

Erin climbed back to the opening, kept herself low to the ground. Lightning flickered. Perhaps half a mile off, a hart bounded across the open fields. It floated over the ground as if in a dream.

But the Darkling Glories came. A howl of warning rose from their throats, a hunting cry that froze the bones, like the call of a wolf mingled with a screaming wind and the rumble of a distant storm.

A lightning bolt was hurled before the hart. It leapt right, making for the shelter of a tree. A second bolt struck the earth. The hart veered again.

Shadows descended. Winged beasts swirled out of the sky like bats dropping into a cave, and the hart was gone.

A shadow blotted out all light overhead, and Erin heard the rush of wings. Something enormous swept through the air above her, then rose again, into the den. Erin felt the wind of its passage.

A Darkling Glory, she realized, her heart thudding. She threw her face into the dirt, and dared not move.

But there was no hunting cry. No claws raked her. Instead, she heard the sound of wings shifting, an enormous bird primping its feathers. It made a soft throaty noise, the sound of an owl, “Whooo.”

But the bird was much larger than any owl. Its wingspan could not have been less than twenty feet.

The lightning continued to strike out on the plains. The tree shook with the rumble of thunder and the roars of Darkling Glories. Lightning flashed overhead. Wind screamed through the tree boughs, and leaves rained down.

Erin clutched the haft of her warhammer, turned to try to glimpse her companion, to see if it posed a threat.

By the flickering thrill of lightning, she saw the beast perched above her, about fifty feet away. A passage looked as if it led down, into a deeper chasm, but the owl crouched upon a knob of moldy root. The raptor was a downy gray, with bits of white at its breast and a collar of black at its throat. Its golden eyes were as large as saucers, and lightning reflected from them.

The owl watched her, unblinking. Its beak was large enough to rip off a man’s arm. It held something dainty in its beak.

Then her light was gone. An afterimage formed in her mind. She’d seen the gleam of bones on the floor. She recognized the owl’s musty smell. This had to be its den.

Lightning flashed, weaving a webwork from horizon to horizon. The owl had closed its eyes, and she saw now what it held in its beak—her dirk!

The owl let the blade fall, and it flashed as it tumbled end over end in the unsteady light, to plunge into a skull on the floor with a whack.

The owl spoke, a whisper that pierced Erin to the core, “Warrior of the Shadow World, I summon you!” The words did not merely ring in Erin’s ears, they spoke to her flesh and trembled through her bones.

You’re dreaming, she told herself. Wake up.

She found herself back in the forest, with a brilliant blue sky overhead. Celinor rode beside her as their horses picked their way through a streambed. A squirrel in a nearby pine raced round its trunk, chattering.

Erin’s heart pounded. In memory she still smelled the musty den beneath the great oak, and heard the grumble of thunder. A surety grew that on some far world, something had found her dagger.

“For one little girl,” Gaborn replied to Averan, “you’re sure full of bad news.”

He gave her a worried smile, stroked her face, and wondered at the portent of her words.