R. Salvatore - The Witch_s Daughter

A hiss of sheer elation escaped the wraith’s mouth.

“You will come to understand power,” Thalasi promised. “And you will enjoy your new toy. We will go in the morning, whether Ardaz has made his appearance or not. Let the Silver Mage come in late, if he will. Let him witness the rout of all the army of Calva.” Thalasi’s glare at the wraith seemed double-edged, promising ultimate glory if they succeeded and ultimate blame if they failed.

“The army is fully yours,” Thalasi explained. “I must prepare for my strikes on the witch and wizard. Tomorrow, Avalon burns to ash, and the White Tower crumbles to dust.”

Mitchell brought the menacing scepter up before his fiery eyes. “And if Ardaz shows his face…” the wraith promised through his wicked grin.

A GLOBE OF darkness rested on the field behind the stirring talon army, a perverted black ball that scorched the grass as it moved. And in the center of this wicked sphere loomed a figure, tall and terrible. Morgan Thalasi called now upon the Staff of Death, tapping its lethal black heel against the soft earth and uttering arcane words of power. The staff responded to the commands of its master, its horrid magic drawing the life force from the ground beneath it and giving it to Thalasi.

“What is that?” Bryan gasped when he noticed the dark spectacle. He and Rhiannon had come over the northwesternmost slopes of the Baerendels just before the gray dawn and were still several miles from the talon encampment, but even from this distance, the globe of blackness shone clearly before their eyes.

“Morgan Thalasi,” Rhiannon replied in a whisper, as if speaking that name would alert the Black Warlock to their presence.

“Angfagdul,” Bryan muttered, using the name his father had used for Thalasi when recounting the legendary Battle of Mountaingate.

“He’s gathering his power,” Rhiannon explained, though she had no idea of why she was so certain of her observation.

“Then we have arrived just in time,” Bryan reasoned. “The battle is about to begin.”

“Just in time?” Rhiannon balked. “To watch, then? What good’ll we do against the likes o’ that one?”

Bryan’s expression turned angry. “Words of doom,” he scolded. “You surrender before the first arrow is loosed!”

Rhiannon dropped her gaze and accepted his rebuke. Bryan was right: she knew that she would indeed play some vital role in the day’s events. For all of her outward helplessness, the young witch could already feel the call of the power tingling within her body.

Thalasi’s black globe sucked the very life and energy from the ground, killing the earth beneath its perverted darkness for eternity. More and more power swelled within the Black Warlock’s body, wracking him with bulging pain. But he kept at his work, though he thought he would surely burst apart, and took in all that he could steal from the earth below him.

In Avalon and Pallendara, and high in the air on the back of a rushing Pegasus, the other three experienced wizards of Ynis Aielle felt the Black Warlock’s pull against the fabric of their magic, bending the cord of the universal energies to his misguided commands.

“Too much,” Ardaz gasped, feeling as if the very bonds of natural harmony would split apart, throwing all the world into chaos. In their distant seats of power, Brielle and Istaahl echoed the Silver Mage’s grim words.

Thalasi cackled with delirious delight, literally drunk with the excess of energies pouring into him. “I am the god!” he proclaimed, his unearthly voice rolling out over the plain, across the river and across all Aielle, reverberating in every ear in the world.

Then the Black Warlock let loose.

He threw his arms upward, his fingers reaching for the sky, and out of his limbs came crackling bolts of black energy, hissing and sizzling as they rushed up to lend power to the gray clouds of the conjured overcast. Thunder rumbled to the Black Warlock’s call, the clouds rolled in whipped fury, and a driving rain rushed out, bent by great western winds into the blank faces of the stunned Calvan army.

Still more black bolts exploded from the warlock’s fingers into the sky, and two particularly dark clouds rushed off, one to the north and one to the east.

Brielle and Istaahl braced themselves, sensing the approach of the mighty storms, for they knew, as did all who witnessed the release of the storms, that the Black Warlock’s targets once again were Avalon and the White Tower.

And this time he meant to have them.

The rain beat down on the soldiers defending the bridges, and the wind remained strong and urging at the backs of Mitchell and the talons. But the wraith knew that Thalasi had otherwise left the battlefield to his command.

“You have heard the master!” Mitchell roared at his lead talon forces. “Take the world for him! Let all the humans run from our fell blades!”

The charge of thirty thousand talons whipped into a killing frenzy by the spectacle of their god-figure and his dark general was on.

They hit the bridges running, heedless of the crossed stakes erected by the Calvans. Those in front willingly impaled themselves that their ugly kin could run over their bodies headlong into the next lines of defense.

The leaders of the defending forces could not have expected such unbridled fury, but King Benador took strength from the aged wisdom of his commanders, from the calm responses of Arien Silverleaf and Bellerian, and from the unfaltering courage of Belexus. The mighty ranger prince and his comrades from Avalon charged the length of the defensive line, rallying the soldiers with promises of victory.

And the value of their efforts could not be underestimated, for the terror on each Calvan soldier’s face changed to grim determination as the rangers passed, and when the talons finally clawed their way through the defensive barriers, they were met head-on by a Calvan charge that rivaled their own in intensity. The Calvans fought for all of those who had died, and for all of those helpless multitudes who would surely die if they could not stop the black tide here and now.

Then all the bridges were thrown into chaos, a clawing, hacking swirl of talon and man. No quarter was asked and none was given; to lose was to die. For the talons, to lose was to face the fury of Morgan Thalasi. For the Calvans, to lose was to realize the destruction of all the world.

Black bile wetted Rhiannon’s throat, sheer horror and disgust at the sight of the conflict. The screams of agony and rage rolled across the distance to her ears. Even Bryan, familiar with smaller-scale and more choreographed skirmishes, felt his knees go weak at the sheer viciousness of the battle, and he winced each time one death scream wailed above all the others.

But Bryan soon steeled himself against his revulsion, reminding himself of the importance of the scene before him. He turned to Rhiannon for counsel, but found the young witch fully entranced by the continuing spectacle of Morgan Thalasi, as if Rhiannon could better understand the deadly implications of his dark efforts.

Now the black bolts ripping upward into the sky from the arms of the Black Warlock came as one unending stream, one reaching north and the other east, fueling the frenzy of the storms as they raced to their destinations.

Bolt after bolt of lightning blasted into the defensive shell over Avalon, a bubble of energy that Brielle had created to protect her forest. The initial blasts were dispersed into showers of multicolored sparks. But each ensuing bolt jolted the Emerald Witch, strained her powers to their very limits, and she knew that soon her shell would collapse.

“Too much!” she yelled, echoing her brother’s words and sending the thought through the connection of their magical energies to the mind of the Black Warlock. “Ye’ll break it all, ye fool!”