James Davis - The Restless Shore

“Hush,” Khault intoned. The quiet word buzzed like a swarm of spring-beetles yet crackled like flame with a force that pushed on Uthalion’s chest challengingly. “Save your steel, child,” Khault said and raised a clawed finger to the spires with a growl that parted the assembled dreamers. They revealed a cobblestone path through the crystals. “Go, embrace your twin. It is all that we have ever wanted for you.”

“No!” Brindani spoke up, straining to speak and sweating with the effort. His nose began to bleed, running over his lips and clenched teeth. “Not all that you wanted-”

“Quiet,” Khault boomed, and Brindani fell back, gasping and clutching his stomach in pain. Khault turned to Ghaelya. “She calls for you … Can you hear her?”

She hesitated for just a moment, looking between Brindani and the spires. The half-elf shook his head wordlessly, reaching out for her, but even Uthalion could hear the oddly familiar voice whispering through the crystal forest. He saw a woman who’d crossed half the wild frontier of her homeland to find a sister taken. The brief stare between the genasi and the half-elf was heartbreaking, but Uthalion knew her expression, had worn it himself once-she wasn’t coming back, not until things were sorted out elsewhere.

She dashed into the spires without a word, lost in the dark within a heartbeat.

“You will be the first, Captain,” Khault said, stretching his misshapen body sinuously. He grew taller, and more hideous, puckered scars opened and closed, some bearing sharp spines. Uthalion stepped back, turning sidelong to the old farmer and presenting his sword. “When she returns from our Lady’s chamber,” Khault continued, “She will be the Walking Prophet, her sister the Dreaming Voice. Twins blessed by the song. And you will be the first to hear their singing and to live at their whims.”

“Madness,” Uthalion muttered. But as he looked out across the ruins, the Choir, the mindless Flock, and recalled the power of the song he’d heard for several nights, a song that had drawn him here as surely as many of the things before him, he felt a twinge of fear.

His heart quickened into an even cadence of battle as he turned his wrist in a circle and set his stance solidly. He eyed the gathered host of nightmares, feeling himself once again the madman at the stormfront, the butcher before witless horrors. He glanced at Brindani who had risen, though dark-eyed and ghost-skinned, to stand with sword ready. And when Uthalion looked for Vaasurri, the killoren was gone, having slipped away quieter than a specter’s breath.

“Keep watch over her,” he whispered, and Khault’s head cocked like a bird’s, his blind senses reacting to the slightest noise. Uthalion narrowed his eyes shrewdly and swung his blade in a whistling flourish as his left hand reached back stealthily, hidden from Khault.

“You should have died in that basement, Captain,” Khault thundered, arching his back like a snake preparing to strike. “Leaving you there was the last of my tender mercies.”

The beasts in the streets moaned and growled as they drew away hesitantly, gnashing their teeth and beating the ground with their fists. Uthalion saw past their fangs and claws, their tentacles and stinging spines-he saw the simple people they’d been and, more importantly, the warriors they had not been.

“You should have died with your wife, Khault,” he replied. “I buried the last of my mercy alongside her.”

Khault’s features twisted in rage. His mouth gaped wide, showing the grips of a very human emotion on an anatomy more suited to the dark depths of a gods-forsaken sea than land. Uthalion smiled cruelly, seeing the man Khault had been still hiding in the beast he’d become. As Khault rose higher, several appendages rose like broken wings from his back, flat growths with tiny barbed mouths at their tips swiftly descending.

Uthalion skipped backward, batting one of the whipping tentacles away as his left hand rose to his lips, a wooden whistle between his fingertips. The tiny instrument, given to him by Chevat of the aranea, blew a single piercing note, barely more than a slight keening in Uthalion’s ears. But its effect on the hordes of Tohrepur was immediate.

Shocked screams spread through the infected assemblage, and thunderous frightened roars shook the ground as the slippery bodies slid back from the piercing whistle. Ears, heightened by exposure to the beguiling song and suddenly cut off from its soothing melody, ran with tiny crimson streams. Chaos reigned as the Flock abandoned their Choir, clawing their way past the pained beasts to seek refuge from the terrible shriek. Khault flinched in pain, stumbling backward, his head turning blindly in confusion for a moment. Then he lurched forward, ignoring the whistle with a rumbling growl.

The air grew thick as Ghaelya ran through the glittering spires, early stars shining in countless reflections all around her. Shapeless fingers breezed over her skin, dug into her flesh with tendrils of ice, and a voice sang to her of fear. A powerful scent of lavender washed over her coldly, and she paused wide-eyed as the vines that led her on twisted and changed. Their deep, rough green became a smooth pale blue that squirmed with life, pulsing with veins and gently writhing in the dirt. The roping stalks slowly converged toward a single point as she followed the broken stone path. Ghostly beams of early moonlight stabbed brightly through the spires, illuminating a large clearing ahead.

The vines knotted and entwined themselves together, disappearing beyond the edge of a wide cavern in the center of the clearing. The constant song took on a hollow, echoing quality, rising from the ground in waves. She stopped at the perimeter of the crystal forest, trembling, unable to look away from the mouth of the cavern and the web of vines spidering out from its depths.

Approaching slowly, she managed her racing heart, suddenly uncertain of herself. She glanced back the way she’d come, seeing more than just the darkness or the long journey behind her, or even her companions facing the Choir without her. She imagined Airspur and her mother sitting alone in their dark family room, weeping and worrying over the disappearance of her daughters. She pictured her father busying himself with work and unable to accept the disintegration of his family, acting among his friends as though all were normal.

She thought of these things and caught herself avoiding the idea of what she could find in the cavern that issued a music so sweet she’d heard it in her dreams and followed it beyond all reason for the brief hope of finding her sister again. She feared the blood her last dream had prophesied. Swallowing her fear, she took a step into the clearing.

“I’m coming, Tess,” she whispered.

I know .

Her sister’s voice stunned her; gliding along inside the singing, it filled her mind. She took another step, her boot disappearing in the smoky mist-grass that filled the clearing. The sudden sense that she was walking on air twisted her stomach with vertigo, but she continued, ripples radiating out from her boots and lapping at the edges of the spires.

“Tess?” she said hoarsely.

I can hear you .

Screams split the night air. The ground shook, and she crouched defensively, her sword turning in a circle and shining in the moonlight. It reflected in the eyes of a figure sitting on the opposite side of the cavern. Rising hope quickly faded as she made out the crouching form of Vaasurri, his black-green gaze fixed with a solemn sorrow.

“It was her song that called us here, a song of the Fey-wild. I should have known,” he said, staring down into the shadows of the cavern and shaking his head. “The song of a sirine, transformed by the Spellplague into a song of ruin, of nightmares made flesh.”