Craig Saunders: Tides of Rythe

Drun stood, pulling Tirielle from Roth’s body.

“Come. We may have lost today, but we fight on until the last breath. The return is nearing, and we must fight with the tools we have.”

“Give me a moment to catch my breath,” said Shorn, his voice rasping and wracked with pain.

Tirielle’s tears fell freely, but she straightened her back and took Shorn around the waist. He winced, but he couldn’t be picky. He needed a shoulder to lean on.

“It was brave, in the end. I would have liked to thank it.”

Tirielle just nodded mutely, and pulled Shorn along, toward the path.

A tearing sound came from behind them, and they turned as one. Shorn’s sword rose, always his first response to a threat. But his knees were trembling, and his head was pounding.

Fire licked at the revenants whole body, spreading fast. It was not rising again, but something was coming. Its belly was being pushed upward, bulging out against the revenant’s insides. There was a wet ripping sound, and a hand pushed through, covered in some sickly fluid.

Shorn held his sword out in one quavering hand. Fire burned inside his arm. It was broken, but somehow he still found the strength to hold his blade.

Tirielle finally drew her daggers. “I’m not dying anymore,” she said.

The hand was followed by an arm, a face, and then a man was pulling himself over the beasts burning belly, stepping through the flames. It was covered, red from head to foot, no doubt with the beast’s lifeblood.

But who, or what, could survive in such a creature’s insides?

The emergent man spat something unthinkable from his mouth, and the corners turned into a toothy smile.

Then he opened his eyes and fierce burning light blinded them all. They could see nothing but the blood red afterglow.

“I am Caeus,” it said, in a voice that was not human, not human at all.

Tirielle left Shorn and ran at the thing, more hideous in its lack of humanity than even a protocrat, more alien in countenance than the revenant, screaming defiance. She would not be tricked at the last.

As she thrust the dagger at the creature, its red eyes blazed and she flew backward.

He closed his terrible eyes for a moment, and the world dimmed and flared, then suddenly the remainder of the Sard appeared, blinking, shocked, in the room. Renir, Wen and Bourninund appeared an instant later, Renir crying out in shock.

The force holding him back disappeared in the wink of an eye, and surprised, Klan blinked. In that moment the fiery rage of the mountain descended on him, a ton of molten lava streaming around him, filling his mouth, running between his toes and fingers, burning his robe from his back and searing his skin with a pain he could not imagine possible.

He screamed, and did the only thing he could. He turned the lava back to stone.

“It is so good to be alive again,” said the last wizard, glowing brighter than the fires leaping around the plateau. “I am most grateful,” it said with a smile that did not touch its burning eyes, eyes infested by the blight.

“My time has come again, and my brothers come. I have much work to do.”

“Never!” cried Drun, who blazed with golden light, but the red wizard, red from head to toe, merely flicked a finger and Drun’s glorious light winked out in an instant. Then he raised his hands and spoke a short incantation, more out of habit than necessity.

In its wake, the cavern under the mountain was deserted. They disappeared from the mountain, back into a world more terrible than anyone could imagine, a world in which the Elethyn, the bastard sons of Carious and Dow, had returned.

The last of the Sun Destroyers, Caeus, would once more shake Rythe to its very core.

Summer fades, and time moves on. It is a time of legends. The end of legends. It is only fitting that the leaves, as heroes, fall.

Heroes are made every day, as long as there is a witness, solitary, perhaps, but one with the power of words to build the legend, and as the old fade, new ones are born.

On Sturma, brave men fought on without a leader, a thousand songs went unsung as the fallen grew and fewer remained to tell the tales of deeds done by those about to die.

On Lianthre, the rahken nation rises, as does a strange continent, far out in the forgotten oceans, unseen, but felt, by the Seafarers. Mountains crumbled, the suns shone, seas flowed over new lands and around the old.

And on the trees, leaves turned, ready to fall.