Robert Vardeman - Istu awakened

'No!' Great shards of rock detached themselves from the walls below and slid into the Gate of the Mountains as the Demon's voice beat down upon them. 'Never! They lack Felarod, and knowledge, and I am strong! Never again shall I be bound. Never!'

Zak'zar gripped the stone guardwall and stared ahead. In the distance he saw a pool of paleness lying against the blackness of the mountains. A glacier. Within it lay his fate. The wind tore at his eyes.

Hours passed like days, like years.

'Vast is the World Spirit,' Selamyl said when Moriana asked him if the summoning was done, if the Spirit had risen to smite its starborn foe. 'It is slow to anger but its wrath is great.'

Fost sat with his back against the wall of the Nexus chamber. He drifted in and out of sleep. When his body realized that no amount of adrenaline was going to make things happen any quicker, it surrendered to the exertions of the day before. But still an urgency nagged at him causing him to half-rise from sleep and dream images.

At some point a servant brought the spirit jars. Fost roused to listen briefly to Erimenes describing how the whole city now pulsed with the same green light that came from the Nexus. Fost thought the pattern's glow brighter than before, but thinking took too great an effort and he slept again.

He came awake abruptly, sensing something vital was about to happen.

The first thing he saw was the City in the Sky. He shook his head, shut his eyes and opened them again. Still it hung in the midst of his vision, above sharp peaks turned molten gold by the rising sun.

'Disconcerting, isn't it?' Erimenes chuckled dryly at his elbow. 'My humble contribution.'

'You caused that?' Somehow, a vision of what was happening miles away had been conjured forth, inside the room.

'Well… no. But it was I who remembered the old stories and told the princess how to call it up.'

Moriana stood where she had before, staring at the picture which occupied one whole wall of the chamber. 'And the Spirit?' he asked. 'Has it come yet?'

'No,' said Ziore from his other side. Her face was stark with worry. 'And soon it will be too late. Poor Moriana.' 'It is come.'

The chamber reverberated to the words. The voice was Selamyl's and yet was not. It was deeper, transformed, as vital and surging as the boom of surf on sand.

Moriana raised her eyes to the scene of the Sky City. It jumped forward. Fost gasped. Then he realized that it was the picture that moved with such speed, not the City itself. He saw the black, horned shape on the parapet and felt a cold greater than that of the Waste seize his bones.

'I call upon the World Spirit to destroy the Demon Istu!' Her words rang out like trumpets. Fost caught his breath. Nothing happened.

'World Spirit! Strike! Raise up your power against the dark destroyer as you did ten thousand years ago!'

Fost felt it now. The energy folded him, restoring strength to his limbs, clearing his weary, scratchy eyes. Each breath was wine. But still nothing happened, no energies leapt forward to oppose the black Demon. 'World Spirit!' screamed Moriana. 'What's wrong?'

'Will,' said that voice which had once belonged to Selamyl. 'It needs a will to guide it.' 'But what of you, you Ethereals?'

A pause. Fost thought of the awesome deliberation of Guardian. The world was much bigger than the glacier. Would the Spirit be commensurately slower?

'We…' For the first time that transcendent voice faltered. 'We lack the will. We have forgotten how to strike out in anger and lack the time to learn.' Synalon rose, stretched catlike and sensuous. 'One thing I've plenty of is will. Sister, shall I?'

Moriana stared into the green fire of the Nexus. This was what she'd feared, that she must enter rapport with the World Spirit and risk the dissolution of that small spark that was her soul, her inner being, her self. The time had come for her to match the dedication already shown by the Ethereals. 'No,' Moriana said and stepped forward.

Fost leaped to his feet, lunged forward and caught her wrist, crying, 'You can't!' 'I must.' Her voice was calm.

'You'll die!'

'And what of that?' She reached out and stroked his cheek with the backs of her fingers. They rasped on stubble. 'I must do this. Only then can I expiate the wrong I created when I helped the Fallen Ones capture the City.' She dropped her hand.

'I love you,' she said. 'Live long and take what happiness you find.' And she stepped into the middle of the Nexus.

Green fire enveloped her. Fost cried out again and started to follow. A steel claw caught his arm. He struggled, then turned back in fury. Ziore held his wrist. There was nothing wispy or insubstantial about her now.

'Do you think she wants you to throw your life away?' the genie asked. 'But…'

'You cannot help her now. You can only distract her.' He stepped back. And the power came up through the floor and shook him and his mind reeled toward blackness.

At the molten core of the planet burned anger.

But it was rage without form, without direction. That vast organism which was the World possessed a thousand senses and each one cried out that something was deathly wrong. A pathogen had invaded its system, a black presence, both alien and destructive. It knew that something must be done but it didn't know what or how.

A feeling tickled the edge of its tiny being, tiny but insistent. Slowly the feeling penetrated it. Slowly it responded.

It sensed other presences, miniscule, separate from and at the same time part of it. It flowed toward them. Somehow it knew that here was the means to channel its anger, to bring its mighty wrath to bear on the wrongness.

It touched the lesser entities and became one with them. It stopped. There was nothing, no direction, no guidance, nothing to purge the irritant.

Then a new presence touched it. Will burned within, a hot, white light. Like a plant questing toward the sun, the World Spirit moved to merge itself with this thing of Will.

At the core of Moriana's being burned anger.

Her City was held captive by an enemy who had betrayed her to possess it. She felt it hanging almost overhead now, and her being ached with the longing for it. But more even than Zr'gsz, she hated their Demon ally. He had defiled her, laid surrogate hands of stone on her and ravished her body while his hell-glowing eyes raped her soul. For that her rage would tear the skies asunder, to visit vengeance upon Istu. Your enemy is near! she thought. Now reach!

The mountain called the Throat of the Dark Ones exploded.

It blasted itself skyward, a mountain launched as a missile into the dawn, riding a column of incandescent gas and ash and the dust of pulverized rock. The Zr'gsz skystone mines disappeared, and those who worked them and those who fought to slow the work. So violent was the blast that huge hunks of the shattered mountain entered orbit around the world to spiral down slowly until the tenuous arms of the atmosphere tangled them and drew them to flaming end.

Such was Moriana's wrath united with the wrath of the World.

Though the wavefront of the blast and the titan sound that rode upon it would not reach the Ramparts for over an hour, Istu felt Mount Omizantrim die. He clawed at the heavens and bellowed his rage. His ancient enemy was come. The fight would be to the death this time.

He turned and strode to the center of the City. His bowed legs straddled the Well of Winds. He spread forth the blackness of his arms. He reached outward, began to flow downward, his form subsiding and swelling to fill the Well. The Black Lens appeared where he had been, glistening, pregnant with power.

A thirty-foot wall of water washed over the island of Wirix and scoured it clean, driven by the blast that slew Omizantrim. But the Wrath had only begun.