Jak Koke - The Edge of Chaos

The pungent odor of decaying plants and humus rose around them like a palpable tide of death. Duvan headed left and up a slope that seemed to be rising as they ran. Leaves and rotting vegetation deepened until they threatened to suck the two down into the muck.

Duvan scrambled up the slope, finding footholds easily. Slanya seemed be struggling to match his pace, but she managed it-a fortunate thing. If they stopped they’d be trapped.

“Will you know how to get back out?” Slanya said.

Duvan nodded. “Of course I will.”

Slanya followed him step for step as they snaked further into the changelands. He kept his eyes open for plaguegrass, but so far there was no sign of the elusive plant. Duvan marveled at the level of trust that Slanya put in him, amazed that she did not question his choices.

Perhaps her faith in the elixir was so strong that she felt protected. The thought of such blind trust in anything so experimental angered him, and he wanted to get her to question it. But he held his tongue. Even if it provided no additional protection from the changelands, at least it reassured Slanya and helped her avoid panicking.

Staying calm was critical in negotiating the dangers of the Plaguewrought Land.

Duvan took them over hills and through the rapidly shifting landscape. Spellplague was ubiquitous in here, all around them, but there were waves and pockets of blue fire, where its intensity was far higher. Duvan tracked these by sound and sight and smell, but also by feel. His stomach grew heavy when remains fo the Spellplague stirred like stormclouds, filling him with a gut-churning irritation.

“Can you feel that?” he asked.

“Feel what?”

“The spellplague-a flare of it is off to our right, moving toward us.”

Slanya shook her head. “I have no sensation of it,” she said.

“You’ll become attuned to it,” he said.

“I doubt it,” she said. “If it were possible to attune myself to something like that, my training would make it simple for me to focus. You have a gift.”

Duvan scowled at her and guided them away from the approaching wave of spellplague. It wasn’t visible yet and seemed to be passing underneath them. Suddenly the fire changed direction and rose up toward them.

The earth heated up around them.

“Run!” But every way Duvan turned, he felt the blue fire. Finally, he stopped running and crouched next to Slanya. “It’s all around us.”

The sky darkened to a deep purple as the smell of burning rock smoldered into the air. The ground beneath their feet started to drift upward.

Slanya covered her ears as the screech of rock against rock crashed in on them. A spiderweb tendril of blue fire spun into existence around Duvan and Slanya.

“Stay close,” Duvan said. “Do what I do.” As long as she remained within about ten paces, his spellscar would keep her safe from the blue fire. And if she wanted to attribute that to Gregor’s elixir, Duvan would just have to hold his tongue.

Duvan’s stomach felt like lead, and the hairs of his back and arms stood straight up. The tendril of spellplague arced toward them, snapping like a whip …

And dissipated just as it was about to hit them, vanished like a puff of smoke in the wind.

The storm seemed to howl with frustration, and underneath them, the ground shifted. Another whiplash of spellplague struck at them. More gut churning, but now Duvan was moving. He didn’t see what happened behind them as he led Slanya in a run away from the spellplague wave.

The earth beneath their feet lurched and rumbled as Duvan dodged the hottest flares. The tilting earth made him stumble, and Slanya fell to her knees behind him, but soon they were back on their feet and heading farther and farther from the surge of blue fire.

The ground seemed to be lifting slowly now, floating upward perhaps. They ran across a narrow patch of hot, dry desert, then down a trail into a shaded cleft. At the bottom of the cleft, Duvan led Slanya across a mossy creek, the rocks slippery from the green growth and dewy moisture.

He reached out to her, and she grabbed his hand. He did so at least as much for his own benefit as hers. The stream’s water misted into the air like rainy fog around them, and for a moment they existed only in a white cloud, drenched and cold and unable to see. But her hand was still in his.

Together meant that she’d be safe. He’d promised to keep her safe.

Then the cloud gave way as they pushed through and up a short incline, emerging to sun and the smell of wildflowers. Warm breezes dried the dew from his forehead and neck as he led them into the tall grass of the meadow.

“Look,” Slanya said. “This meadow is filled with plaguegrass!”

The grassy field ended abruptly, Duvan noticed, at a cliff. The shifting ground and the sensation of rising was clear now. They were on a mote, a large one to be sure. “Get as much as you can now,” he said. “This meadow might not be here much longer. Beyond that edge there is nothing but a long fall.”

Slanya’s eyes widened as she gazed out over the rim of the cliff. The ground below, dotted with flares and wisps of blue and white spellplague, receded quickly. “By the gods, how do we get off of this?” Slanya said.

“We don’t,” Duvan said. “We’re too far up now, and the plaguegrass is right here. We’ll have to wait until it floats back down.”

The mote they were on was a good three hundred feet above the rest of the land. And it was rising. Fortunately, it seemed to be heading toward a swath of the changelands that was relatively stable, for the moment. Duvan breathed a little relief; it looked like they’d have clear sailing on still waters, for a short while at least.

Ahead, however, they would run into trouble. If the mote stayed on course, it was headed directly into the center of the changelands. Still a good distance away, but definitely in their current path, was what Duvan recognized as the vortex of a spellplague storm.

A dark blue sky streaked with purple made the backdrop for a swirling whirlwind of destruction. Gossamer threads of white and blue entangled with flames of red and yellow in an angry and wild display of raw nature. It was beautiful and terrible, awesome and indiscriminately perilous.

And they were heading directly into it.

A hot, grassy meadow stretched out around Slanya, an illusion of peace in this landscape of unpredictability and turmoil. Beyond the edge of the meadow-mote, she knew the Plaguewrought Land boiled with the rising blue fire.

Still, the smell of flowers and the warm tran-quility of the meadow in the hot sun lulled her. The peace of the here and now was a pleasant anomaly. A vision of how life could be, how life should be despite the larger landscape of danger and chaos. It was too easy to forget the world beyond-the world that would rapidly intrude without warning.

“It’s going to be calm for a little while, I think,” Duvan said, shading his eyes from the last rays of sunlight slicing down through the clouds and the constellation of smaller motes above them.

Looking over at Duvan, so confident and reassured amid the surrounding hysteria and flux, Slanya thanked Kelemvor for Duvan’s presence. The man could be infuriating and pig-headed, but he was proving strong and knowledgeable. Indispensable. Slanya would be dead without him. Right now he was staring into the distance, his brow knitted in consternation.

Duvan’s black eyes sparkled in the light. His broad nose and boyish face were at odds with the three-day beard and straggly mane of hair. When he turned to look at her, his gaze was gentle. “Gather up as much as you can while we have time,” he said. “I’ll try to figure out how to get us off this rock and out of here.”