Michael Manning - The Line of Illeniel

The stone had arched up until it nearly covered my shield on three sides, but now it began to crumble and fall away. The figure of a woman still stood facing us on one side.

“It is done,” intoned Cyhan and he began untying the gem. It was still glowing as he placed it into the pouch on his belt. Outside the shield the stone woman still faced us, she had gone still but her face bore an expression of incredible sadness. Tears of pure crystal welled from her eyes to fall tinkling upon the floor, until at last she was motionless again. For some reason I felt like crying with her.

Penny looked at me, “Mort! What happened to your eyes?”

I blinked at her, she looked subtly different. Glancing around the world seemed a little dimmer but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly ‘what’ was dimmer. Then I noticed Penny’s eyes were no longer brown… they were blue, “Never mind mine! Look at yours!”

She got up to find a mirror and almost fell over. When she stood she came a half a foot off the floor and was ill-prepared for the landing, “What the hell?” She moved cautiously after that. “Is it safe to go outside now?”

She was gesturing at the stone semi-circle that partially enclosed the area of my shield. I looked at Cyhan to see what he thought, “What do you think?”

“I think now that your mind is your own we will have little to fear. Do you sense anything outside the area of your protection?” he answered.

I stretched out my mind, feeling the room around us but sensed nothing. The stone woman was now merely a statue. “I think she’s gone,” I replied.

“You keep referring to it as ‘she’, but it was merely a deeper part of your fractured mind,” Cyhan said.

I still didn’t agree with that assessment. I knew there was no way I could have moved so much stone so effortlessly. At the very least I would have felt the strain from it. It was hopeless trying to convince him of that though. I lowered the shield around us and we moved out into the shambles that remained of the duke’s breakfast room. The floor had shifted and buckled, overturning furniture and popping the doors from their frames. The expensive glass windows were shattered.

The most astonishing feature of the newly remodeled room was the crumbling stone semi-circle around where we had performed the bonding, that and the statue of course. The statue was a flawless rendition of a beautiful young woman. The details even went so far as to include braids in her hair. Even the nails on her hands had tiny almost indiscernible cuticles. I bent down to gather up the small crystal tears that had fallen to the floor. “I wonder what these are,” I mused.

“If I were to hazard a guess… quartz, or perhaps diamond,” Cyhan responded. I made a mental note to myself to have them appraised. At the very least they were a notable memento of the occasion.

“Holy crap!” Penny shouted as she ran back into the room. She overshot her mark and ran into a wall before she could stop. She dusted herself off and walked to me more carefully. “I found a mirror Mort. My eyes are blue!” She was almost vibrating with excitement.

“I know… I noticed a minute ago.”

“But yours are brown!” she said.

“Huh?”

Cyhan spoke up, “It’s a rare side-effect of the bonding. Certain traits are sometimes transferred between the wizard and his Anath’Meridum. Eye-color changes are rare but not unheard of. There are other more deliberate changes you will both notice as well.”

“If I find myself fancying men I’m putting an end to myself,” I replied pithily.

“I feel different already,” Penny enthused, “stronger. And the world looks different. Mort you’re positively glowing… everything is so… bright.” She smiled at me, “I always wanted blue eyes.”

“I liked your eyes the way they were,” I groused. She looked almost unnatural with those blue diamonds flashing under her dark hair.

“The bond will make you stronger, faster, and more able to fight than you were before. The effect is in direct proportion to the strength of the wizard bonded. You may be even stronger than me now,” the older warrior informed her.

With hardly a thought she slapped him, hard. The motion was so fast I hardly saw her hand move. “That was for earlier,” she said.

The warrior grinned as he rubbed his face, “Guess that makes us even.”

“Hardly, I owe you about a dozen more, but they can wait till we train.”

“Don’t get overconfident. You’re still as clumsy as a newborn pup. It will take some time to adjust to your new-found strength and speed.”

I on the other hand, didn’t feel any better at all. It seemed like a very one sided deal. The voices were gone, true enough. I could no longer hear the murmuring of the wind, the heartbeat of the earth or the sound of that all too real woman’s voice. Now that they were gone I missed them, I had begun to get used to them I suppose. The world seemed emptier now, more sterile, as if the life had been drained from it. Then a thought occurred to me, “Where’s Rose?”

We stared at one another. She had been with us at the start but she was nowhere to be seen now. “I saw her step away after she handed me the sword but I wasn’t watching her,” said Penny.

I cast out my mind, exploring the house around us. I immediately found Marc, his father James, and a number of other people, but Rose was not among them. I examined the room around us more closely and then I felt her, buried under a pile of rubble where one wall had collapsed. Her heart was beating rapidly so I knew she was still alive. “She’s over here,” I announced and walked over to the tumbled stones and timbers. “She’s buried, but alive.”

I didn’t wait for Penny or Cyhan to start hauling the debris away, instead I spoke a few words and using my will I quickly cleared away the large granite blocks and fallen lumber. Beneath it all was a hard stone shell. It looked as if the floor had flowed up over and around her to form a solid stone shield. I wasn’t sure how to undo or replicate the way the stone had flowed so I carefully reached out to explore the layout of Rose’s body within the shell.

Once I had a clear image of her body I created a shield of force within the empty space, around her and between her and the stone. Then I applied a sharp hammer-like blow with my mind, shattering the stone sarcophagus-like shell. As the stone broke apart I could see Rose’s frightened expression within. The moment the fragments fell away she tried to sit up, only to strike her head against the hard shield I had placed around her. “Ow!” she yelped.

If it hadn’t been for the serious nature of the situation I might have laughed. I made a mental note to remember this for future harassment, and then I removed the spell around her. “How in the world did you manage this Rose?”

She started dusting herself off carefully. I could almost imagine a cat cleaning its fur she was so meticulous. “I moved back to watch, and then the floor started moving. I fell down over here and the wall collapsed on top of me. I thought I was going to be crushed.”

“Well you survived somehow. How did that stone surround you like that?”

“I think that stone woman did it. When the wall collapsed she saw me, and I think she made the floor rise up around me…or something like that. I’m not really sure, it all happened so fast,” she said.

I glared at Cyhan, “My sleeping mind again I’m sure.” I don’t know why I kept trying sarcasm on him; he seemed completely oblivious to it.

“Most likely,” he replied.

I wasn’t buying it. Whoever the woman had been she was no fragment of my unconscious mind. She was real, and if her actions were any proof, she could not be malignant. Of course by that logic Marc’s goddess was a sweetheart as well. She had a pronounced proclivity for healing the sick and similar good works. I decided I would reserve judgment for the time being. The stone lady might have ulterior motives just as the gods did.