David Farland - Sons of the Oak

The loci needed this information, this piece of the rune, to bind all of the shadow worlds back into One True World, flawless and brilliant, and under their control.

Asgaroth had taken Rhianna in the hopes that through her, Asgaroth could lead Fallion astray, make a tool of him, until a locus infected him, as it did the bright Ones that were under Shadoath’s sway.

Fallion saw it all so clearly, he was amazed that he had never understood. In that moment his attention flickered, and Asgaroth fled.

One moment the locus gripped Rhianna and the next it released, surging off quicker than thought, so that Fallion saw it only briefly, escaping from the corner of his eye.

“Kill it!” Rhianna was shouting, and her voice suddenly rose above the pounding of blood in his ears. “Kill me if you must. Just get rid of it!”

Fallion suddenly found himself growing cold, shaking. The light in him had died, and the torch in his hand and the torches all around the room had all but burned out.

Dozens of children had come awake, and they huddled around him, peering with huge eyes, some of them screaming in terror, many of them coughing from smoke.

Fallion heard guards rushing toward the keep, iron shoes clanking down the hall. With a thought, he sent the smoke hurtling from the room, billowing down the corridor toward the guards, filling the narrow passage.

Fallion had Rhianna pinned to the floor, his knee in her chest, and now he crawled off.

I’ve burned her, he thought. I’ve blinded her.

But Rhianna was crying, shouting, “Kill it. Do it now!” and Fallion realized that whatever harm he had done to her, she would bear it gladly.

“It’s gone,” Fallion told her. “The locus has gone from you.”

Rhianna choked on a sob, reached up and hugged him, weeping bitterly.

“Can you see?” he asked.

“I can see,” she said. “I’m fine. I’m good. I’m good. I’m good. I’m good.” She repeated the words over and over, as if to comfort herself or to comfort him.

Fallion held her, hugged her tightly. “I know,” he said. “I know you’re good.”

Far away, Shadoath rode upon the back of a white graak, soaring above the tops of the stonewood trees, when suddenly a shadow whispered to her soul.

“The torch-bearer has awakened. He comes to destroy us all.”

She closed her eyes, and in her mind saw what had happened to Asgaroth. Fallion had burned him with light, pierced him, devastating the locus.

Indeed, even as Asgaroth whispered to her, Shadoath could sense that he was dying.

For long moments, the shadow wailed in pain, until at last it fell silent.

Shadoath was stunned.

No locus had ever died.

We are eternal, she thought. We are spread across a million million shadow worlds, and not one of us has ever died. Asgaroth was one of the great and powerful ones.

But Fallion had awakened, had summoned a light that even the Bright Ones of old could not match.

If Asgaroth can die, so can I.

In rising fear, Shadoath raced her graak to Garion’s Port. Fallion would be coming for her, that much was certain. There was a new terror in the universe.

Shadoath was not ready to face him.

Fallion led Rhianna from the Dedicates’ Keep, into the outer corridors and to the guards’ chamber.

There, Fallion shoved on the door, found that it was unlocked.

The golath guards in the darkened chamber cringed and hacked, trying to clear the smoke from their lungs.

Some of them moaned in pain, their voices sounding strangely musical.

They had retreated here, fleeing. Fallion held his torch aloft, and he could see the flames dancing in their eyes.

“Take good care of the children,” Fallion warned them. “Or when I return, your cries of pain will become a symphony to me.”

He shut the door, walked out into the evening light. It limned the bowl of the volcano, all along the ridges.

A hundred yards away, near a rock, the sea ape lay on the ground, her huge paw still wrapped around Abravael’s throat.

Both of them were dead. Fallion could tell even at a distance by the whiteness of Abravael’s face, by the frantic way that his fingers clawed at the sky even though he lay perfectly still.

Rhianna stumbled to the pair, reached down, and petted the sea ape’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “He could never have loved you half as well as you deserved.”

Then Fallion led Rhianna past the dead strengi-saat, where she cringed in terror, and to the sea graak.

The great beast lifted off, lugged them both the three miles to the island of Wolfram. But the weary graak could not carry the weight of two for any great distance, and at Wolfram the children landed near the deserted docks, where they found a leaky sailboat.

They scrounged up some food-strange bread from the netherworld that tasted sweet and filling, along with some old dried figs.

A strong wind and a single sail was enough to let them reach Garion’s Port by late morning.

Fallion had no endowments with which to do battle. Instead, as the boat sailed toward port, he raised his left hand to the sky and drew down sunlight, ropes of light that came twisting out of the heavens in cords of white fire, running down his arm, filling him with light.

The sky darkened as he did this, and the ropes of fire blazed in the false night like lightning.

By the time he reached port and sailed between the Ends of the Earth, he was prepared for battle.

He saw the remains of ships in the harbor, but Shadoath’s armies had gone.

One great worldship lay beached a mile north of the city. Even from a distance, Fallion could see that it was empty.

Fallion and Rhianna climbed up a rope ladder into the stonewood trees at the port, and everywhere they found refugees returning to their homes.

“The armies ran off,” the innkeeper at the Sea Perch said. “They all took off last night, heading inland. They were blowin’ retreat on their warhorns, runnin’ like mad. And all of us folks that they’d captured, they just left us to ourselves.”

Fallion nodded thoughtfully, and told the innkeeper, “There’s an island to the south of Wolfram, a small island with a volcano. At its top you’ll find a couple hundred children, Shadoath’s Dedicates.”

The innkeeper looked outraged. “We’ll ’ave to kill ’em,” he said. “There’s no other choice!”

Fallion shook his head and promised, “Shadoath will be dead by the time you reach the children.”

Fallion looked inland, wondering how far away the armies would be, and because he was filled with fire and light, he suspected that he knew the answer: he might never reach them.

Shadoath and her followers were fleeing far beyond the bounds of this world.

Shadoath had known that he was coming, and had grown afraid.

Fallion went to the Gwardeen Wood, and there found some male graaks. He and Rhianna rode them inland for several miles, following the river, until at the edge of the woods they spotted a large rune upon the ground, a green tracing of fire in a circle of ash. Within the circle, the flames formed something that looked vaguely like a serpent.

Golaths were charging from the woods by the hundreds, racing into the circle and then leaping but never landing, simply disappearing.

It was a gateway to the One True World.

Fallion saw no sign of Shadoath or even a single Bright One that served as her guard. The leaders had been the first to flee.

It would have taken little for Fallion to close the gate, to suck the last of the flames away and make the exit disappear. But then the folks of Landes-fallen would only have had to face a cruel enemy, the stranded golaths.