Michael Mathias - The Wizard and the Warlord

“You’ve already killed your grandchild and your son, you old fool,” Dieter said with defiance in his voice. “You’re a kin killer, lower than the roots of the festering. You may take my head, but worm rot and drought have already plagued your soul.”

“Die!” Lord Revan spat as he began his swing.

“Stop it now!” the Queen Mother yelled from the tree line.

As if to punctuate the powerful anger she felt over what she was witnessing, the ground and the trees around them shook for an instant. Only the swift action of a young sentinel who had listened closely to Dieter’s words stopped the blade that was swinging at him.

The raging elven lord spun his deflected blade around and squared off, facing the Queen Mother’s approach. He was standing in the dead center of the lifeless circle, and the forest clearing had gone suddenly silent.

“You’d kill me, too?” the Queen Mother asked. Pointing at Dieter she ordered, “Unbind him now.” Dieter saw that, a few paces behind her, Varial Teak was leading a group of Willowbrow archers into the clearing. Dieter’s father wasn’t one of them, but he was nonetheless glad to see his cousins and uncles.

The Redwood sentinels untied Dieter and he ran stumbling toward his family. He was careful not to get into their lines of fire. All of them had their arrows trained on Lord Revan.

As the Queen Mother stepped into the blackened circle with the Redwood lord, the ground shook again, only harder. Several of the Redwood sentinels stumbled, and a few of them took a knee, bowing to the power of the Queen Mother’s wrath.

The Queen Mother hesitated. Dieter could tell by her expression that she hadn’t caused the quaking boom. Lord Revan started his swing, swift and sure, but it never found her flesh. Below them, the ground fell away into an empty nothingness. Four sentinel guards, the Queen Mother, and Lord Revan fell tumbling into a hole.

The next thing Dieter knew, a Choska demon came shooting up out of the hole. In its claw was the broken form of the Queen Mother. In its jaws was half of Lord Revan. Behind it, like a swarm of ants coming out of a disturbed mound, was an army of hellspawn. Malformed humanoid things, part beast, part insect, began to attack. They were armed with tooth and claw, stinger and talon. A pair of hellcats came flapping out, all scale-covered blackness, like panthers with thumping leathery wings.

Unlike the other slack-jawed elves around him, Dieter snatched a bow from one of his cousins and put an arrow into the breast of a wyvern. The beast came crashing down out of the sky. The battle for the Evermore was underway.

Princess Telgra’s heartfelt wail was accompanied by the gasps and moans of the elven members of her escort. Only moments ago, Phen had told them that Hyden Hawk had made a sending so powerful that it rattled his skull.

“Defend the Wardstone with all you have, Mikahl! Go, do it now!” Phen told them. The message, when he’d repeated it, got snickers and snorts of disgust from the haughty elves of the delegation. Now, Phen saw that something was affecting them, too. He only cared about Telgra, though, and her saddened, tear-streaked face tore at his heart.

“What is it?” he asked carefully.

“The Queen Mother, my mother, just died.” She paused her step and looked up at the sky for a moment. “I am the Queen Mother now.” Her voice was full of regret.

A power she had only been told about began filling Telgra. The love and pain of all the hearts of the elves in Arbor were transferring from her mother’s wonderful soul to hers. Phen was left as an afterthought, as not only the spirit world of the Arbor went through the changes, but the physical as well. Telgra shuddered and wailed as the power filled her. A breeze picked up, whipping snow from the branches of the evergreens that stood among the leafless oaks and elms. The wind carried a moaning sound. The elves of the escort took a knee and bowed to Telgra, but she didn’t notice. Her wild yellow eyes were full of love and fear. Both terror and triumph manifested in her gaze, but then a different emotion took reign and her brows narrowed fiercely. In a voice full of menace she spoke.

“Get up! We must move like the wind.”

She started into a brisk jog. Arf, the great wolf Phen was riding so that his malnourished legs wouldn’t slow them down, took off after her, as did the other elves of the escort. Dostin’s great wolf mount, Yip, kept a steady, padding pace with them, too.

“For all of you who disregarded Phen’s warning as human folly,” she said with contempt in her voice, “you should feel ashamed. For if the elven mages who heard the warning had listened to Hyden Hawk’s words, the Queen Mother might still be alive.” She paused only to see that all of her escort could hear her words. “The demons we chose to let the humans battle alone are back in force. Elven arrogance just might be the cause of our own uprooting. The Evermore is under attack.”

In her mind, Telgra sent the command to gather and fight to those elves closer to the Arbor Heart. The few anguished responses she received told her that the enemy had already overwhelmed them. Through their eyes and emotions, she was nearly stopped in her tracks. The elves of the Evermore were being cut down like wheat before a scythe.

The sun had yet to set in Westland when Hyden Hawk’s powerful call rang through the aether. King Jarrek and the dwarven delegation had long since made their way back to Castlemont, and both Lord Spyra and Master Wizard Sholt were preparing for their newly appointed positions. The carefree spirit of the feast was all but a memory.

Lord Spyra was off braving the snow and touring Settsted Stronghold and its many outposts. He insisted on doing it now, so that when the southern weather worsened he could spend that idle time planning and preparing his command over the garrisons.

Master Wizard Sholt was now instructing De’Rain and a few other promising students, and had resumed his role as the High King’s Master Wizard.

It was in the capacity of both positions, teacher and royal wizard, that Sholt, De’Rain and a young girl of seven, named Suza, were all out in the strange bailey yard this evening. This particular bailey had once been Queen Shaella’s garden. The Master Wizard and his apprentices were studying the qualities of the circle the red priests of Kraw had burned into the grass there the previous year. Sholt had tried all of the obvious banishing and replenishing spells to try to make the dead spot hold life again, but none had worked. King Mikahl had ordered the anomaly removed, destroyed or even built over if necessary. Sholt and his students wanted to understand why no snow would stick there when the ground was no colder or warmer than that around it, and why no vegetation had grown there all last summer.

Sholt secretly hoped that the youngsters would notice something he’d overlooked, or maybe come up with some new angle of approach to the problem. Master Sholt was contemplating these things when Hyden Hawk’s sending blasted into his mind like a war drum. De’Rain and Suza heard it, too. The sound was so harsh in Suza’s little head that it made her cry out in fear and pain.

“Defend the Wardstone with all you have, Mikahl! Go, do it now!”

Once Master Sholt realized the sending was from Sir Hyden Skyler, he went into immediate action.

“Stay with her, De’Rain,” Sholt said. With a flourish and a sizzling crackle, he disappeared.

The High King was on his way to meet his queen, her handmaiden Allysan, and Lady Lavona. The women had a concern about something or another and wanted him to hear it out so that it wouldn’t alarm anyone else in the castle. Mikahl had no idea what the issue was, but since he couldn’t seem to refuse his wife anything, he was about to find out; at least until Master Sholt came rushing down the corridor pushing servants and workers aside like a madman.