R. Salvatore - Bastion of Darkness

Ardaz blanched white. He knew; he felt it. His niece, budding with power, growing into so fine a woman, was gone. Simply gone. Dead and beyond his help. The wizard, feeling very old suddenly, turned about slowly and looked back to the east, toward Avalon. If he knew, then so did Brielle.

Indeed, the horrible sensation, the waves of Rhiannon’s last moment, washed over the Emerald Witch, stealing the blood from her face, stealing the rhythm of her heart. Her knees lost all strength and buckled, and she slumped down to the white carpet of snow, kneeling there, unable to speak, to cry out, even to gasp.

All of it was not lost on the father of Rhiannon. He, too, felt the terrible sensation, and at first couldn’t decipher it. But seeing Brielle, broken beyond belief, helped him sort it out.

“No!” he cried, and he did not cut the word short, but held it: “Noooooooo!” It was a plaintive wail, a howl almost, torn from his heart and his throat, released into the empty air. He was up on his toes, knees bent forward, back arched and head thrown back, throwing the wail up to the sky, to the ears of the Colonnae.

And surely they were deaf, for they did not respond, did not come to him now, when he most needed them, did not repair the grief, or return Rhiannon.

“Noooooooo!”

She was gone, just gone. Rhiannon, his daughter, was just gone.

But then he knew; suddenly he knew. DelGiudice had wondered why he had been put back in this place, in this time, had wondered if his tasks were no more important than the retrieval of the diamond sword. Now he knew. Rhiannon was gone, but he could get to her, only he: half a ghost, half a man. He had been to Death’s dark realm only briefly, an instant of time before Calae had whisked him off to the stars. Only an instant of time, but DelGiudice remembered the way.

The wail continued, so profound, so agonized, that it drew Brielle from her own broken grief to look up at DelGiudice, to wonder what manner of being could offer such an expression of pain. Her expression shifted to one of horror as Del began to thin out, to become more translucent, as if his very life force was escaping this spirit form on the notes of that howl.

“Del, me Del, don’t ye be leaving me now!” the witch cried, scrambling to her feet, rushing over to him.

There was nothing to grab onto, and soon, nothing to see.

The wail diminished, spread wide to the winds, and was no more.

No more was he a separate entity from the giant wave; no more was he Istaahl the mortal man. He sensed the shallows, knew in some primordial way that he was approaching the high cliffs of the shore.

Then he hit, a mountain of water, exploding in ecstasy against the dark stone of Kored-dul, thundering into the stone unabashedly, straight on, throwing all his life into it.

The roar went on and on, reverberating about the stones, and into the stone, the energy of the crashing water reaching every crack like grasping tendrils. And when the water was gone, the wave broken apart and splashed back out toward the sea, the reverberations continued, echoing.

A great slab of the cliff broke apart and slid down, thundering as it bounced off the stone, then hitting the water with a huge splash. The weakened cliff continued to tremble; another piece broke away. And then another; and then another.

And then it fell, all of it, taking the fire-ravaged disaster of Talas-dun with it.

“O Death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” Del shouted, stealing from an old passage he remembered, from the time before Aielle, from his world and a passage of Corinthians in a book called the Bible. How clear the words of that most ancient tome came to him now. He knew the book so well, though in life he had paid it hardly any heed. It was a book of the angels, the Colonnae, and a work of morality, of life and death, and life after death. He moved along a gray and foggy corridor, a cold place, passing the line of newly disembodied spirits. Their numbers alone told him that the battle was on in full, and also that Thalasi’s hold over the undead spirits was no more.

“O Death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” he shouted again, running now, passing all of them, descending swiftly to a place darker and colder still. He paused and felt within himself, and there, in a deep place, he sensed the passage of his daughter, and was soon fast on her trail. “And where is thy horror, ugly fiend?” he added, his own thoughts, as he came into the passage and then the chamber, in sight of the cloaked lord of the underworld.

“What terrors have thee left? What pains can thee promise, when thou hast taken all?” Del shouted.

“No promise, ghost of Jeffrey DelGiudice,” the specter replied in its unearthly, rasping voice.

“Is there no sympathy, no passion, no care for all the pain?”

“None,” Charon replied without hesitation. “I take nothing; I give nothing. I am.”

DelGiudice hesitated now, digesting the thoughts, the apparent impassivity. It occurred to him that an apathetic Death was, perhaps, more difficult an opponent than a malignant spirit.

“I will bargain,” he offered.

“I take nothing,” Charon replied. “I give nothing. No barter, no trade.”

“You took her!” Del accused, pointing to the bier where lay his daughter dear, so peaceful.

Too peaceful.

“She came to me by her own actions.”

Del stared at Rhiannon’s spiritual form, mirroring her physical form, lying perfectly still upon the bier, half wrapped by Charon’s eternal shroud.

“Give her back, I beg,” Del said.

“Back to whom?” Charon replied impassively. “To you? Need I remind you that you, too, are dead, Jeffrey DelGiudice? It is not an evil thing.”

“No,” Del agreed. “Not evil. But not for her. Not yet. She was just starting to know life.”

“That temporary aspect of life,” Charon said. “Now she will learn the next.”

Del shook his head. “No, no, no,” he kept saying, for though he knew that death was not a wicked thing, not an emptiness and certainly not painful, he felt, somehow, that this was not Rhiannon’s time, that the manner of her death, the breaking of that perverted staff, did not justify this end to her mortal coil.

But how to tell that to Charon the impassive? How to justify it when so many other young men and women had died, and would continue to die, this very day, long before they had really been given a chance to experience all that the previous life offered?

“I only know,” he said quietly, looking up at the specter, “it is not her time.”

Arien led them into the foothills, the sure-footed Avalon mounts quick-stepping past rocky jags and over the multitude of corpses. Enemies were not readily apparent, for those talons who had remained near the front lines had been brought down by the zombies and skeletons, and those who had been farther back had run away.

Arien meant to find them, though, every one, and end the scourge of the children of Thalasi once and for all. First, though, he turned his elves to the south, linking them up with Benador’s thousands, and he and Ardaz joined with the king.

“The world could not have hoped for a greater rout,” the king of Calva stated, his elation apparent. “The evil talons will be many generations recovering, if ever they do.”

“Never,” a dour Ardaz said, “for Thalasi is defeated, dead and gone forever.”

“Your news is wondrous, yet you speak it with heavy heart,” Benador noted.

“For my niece, Rhiannon, too, is gone,” Ardaz replied. “And so, too, is Istaahl, who has been my friend for centuries!”

The news hit King Benador hard, and he purposefully had to steady himself, else he would have fallen from his mount. “Istaahl gone?” he asked breathlessly, and he seemed a lost child at that moment.