Ari Marmell - The Warlord_s legacy

Wondered, and began to despair, until Khanda shuddered. His face went slack, and his entire body fell back against the nearest wall.

No, not his body. The body he'd created around himself, to wear in the mortal realm. A body over which he had full and absolute control.

A body that, inhabited by a demon, possessed no mortal soul. It hurt. Oh, Arhylla Earth-Mother, it hurt!

The ground beneath her was rough, abrasive against her feet. The scents of thick soil and rock dust and sweat in the air were acrid, scratching at her lungs with ragged claws, until she was certain she must choke on her own blood. Around her, every line, every corner, the edge of every brick, the contours of every stone, were razor-edged, slicing at her even from feet and yards away.

And those lines looked wrong. The illumination came, not from above, but from all around her. They burned, the people burned; men and women both, and she recognized none of them. She saw no faces, saw no features, for the light emanated from deep inside them, through bone and flesh and fabric and armor.

Every mortal soul, every soul, was a light-and that light was terrible. It pierced the eye, no matter how she turned away; cast shadows sharp enough to slit her own flesh; burned against and beneath her skin, inferno and infection intertwined as one, worse than hell's own fire.

A world, a whole world, of torment, distilled impossibly pure.

But not everywhere. Not quite.

Amid the awful glow were patches of comforting shade; open wounds in mortal flesh seeped blood and pain, and from those spots, the light grew dim. She heard hopeless cries, the song of sorrow and fear, and where despair shrouded any soul, the burning abated.

She laughed a cruel, exulting laugh, rejoicing as the agony of those nearby lessened her own, if only just. Laughed, and wept, for she understood that in a world of such perfect torment, the waning of her own pain was the only joy.

Pummeled by agony, weeping ever harder as she sought only to lash out, to inflict more pain to detract from her own, she doubled over, gazing down…

The body she wore was not bird, nor beast, nor her familiar feminine form garbed in earthen browns and forest greens, but clad all in black, a thing that was not human in human form.

And Seilloah remembered. Who she was, where she was, what she must do; she remembered.

She also understood now, just a little, what Khanda was. And she almost, almost pitied him.

Then Seilloah rose up, gathered her strength for the very last time, and reached out through the body she wore, wrestling it away from the demon it housed…

CORVIS CLOSED, AND FOR A SINGLE heartbeat, he saw Khanda's lips curve, not in his own smile, but in Seilloah's. He saw, and his heart exulted.

Khanda had no soul, perhaps, but his will was great. For only seconds, those few heartbeats before the demon understood what had happened and fought back, would the witch have control.

But those few seconds were enough for her to draw upon the demon's own power, to send it flowing through muscle and bone and organ. To reshape his body within, rather than without.

To make him well and truly and utterly mortal.

Corvis swept up Talon from where it lay at their feet. He smiled, too, meeting Seilloah's eyes behind Khanda's. And then, both hands clenched upon the brutal Kholben Shiar, he struck.

The axe punched through half the demon's rib cage with a shower of bone and blood, embedding itself deeply in the stone wall beyond. Khanda-and it was Khanda, again-stared at him, then down at his mangled body. He raised his head, he opened his lips…

SHE WELCOMED THE PAIN OF THE BLADE, the swift fading of the body she wore. It meant that she'd won, that the far greater torment in which she'd lived for so long would soon fade, that she had not suffered it in vain, that…

Her limbs shuddered around her; a wave of fire and rot washed over her thoughts, sweeping them away. In the dark of the cellar, or perhaps in her own mind, a pair of eyes gleamed open, staring at her through four separate pupils.

And just before the world faded away, she heard that terrible voice, one last time, in her own soul.

/Not alone!/

"NOT…" KHANDA COUGHED, wet blood spraying his enemy's face. "Not alone…"

Then he was gone, just another corpse to fall at the feet of Corvis Rebaine.

Corvis turned toward the others, a smile stretching across his face, and took a single step…

The sky screamed, the whistling of the final spell Khanda would ever cast. Corvis heard it coming, tried to dodge aside, but the last of his strength was gone. His entire left side was numb, the floor around his feet a slick pond of blood. He fell back, slumping to the floor against the wall, sinking down to Khanda's side. He reached, grasping at Talon, trying to pull himself up once more, and the Kholben Shiar shifted, grinding even farther into the battered and broken stone of the cellar.

A resounding crack echoed as the demon's magic slammed into the splintered ceiling above. Dust choked the air, perhaps an unnatural mist rising to hide the next world from mortal view. Corvis fell prone beneath the weight of the invisible force, felt the first of the stones falling on his shoulders like hail, heard the rumble of shifting masonry, and allowed himself to drift away

NOTHING MOVED but a final handful of rocks, clattering off the heap of stone that now filled a quarter of the cellar. They bounced with hollow clacks and clicks, finally tumbling across the floor and fetching up against the corners. The clouds of grit began, oh so gradually, to sift down from the air, the echoes of the ceiling's collapse to fade from aching ears.

Mellorin attempted to stand and found she could not for the weight atop her. Only then did she remember where she was. "I…" She swallowed, trying to clear the dust from her mouth, her throat. "I'm all right, Uncle Jassion."

She felt the suspicion, the tension in his tentative shifting, but he moved. She rose, knees wobbly, abandoning her blood-encrusted dagger on the floor. Her steps hesitant, she staggered toward the heap of broken stone that had buried one man she had thought she'd loved, and another she'd thought she hated. She felt a dampness on her cheeks, but for the moment she wept no more. Her soul was distant, numb; she had no more tears to shed.

Without thought, she reached toward the stones, and blinked in dull confusion at the fingers that clamped around her wrist, halting her.

"Don't," Jassion told her. It took her a moment to recognize the foreign tone in his mangled voice as compassion. "We don't know how precarious that pile is. You could bring it down on you."

"I never… I never got to…"

"I know. I'm sorry, Mellorin." And damn if it didn't sound like he meant it, too.

She heard shuffling, watched from the corner of her eye as Irrial appeared beside her. Mellorin flinched as the older woman laid a hand upon her shoulder, but did not pull away.

"He loved you, Mellorin. Whatever else you hear about him-and there will be much you'll wish you hadn't-believe that he loved you."

"I think… I think I almost do."

With that she crossed back across the chamber, leaving the unsympathetic stone behind, crouching to retrieve the one piece of her father that remained. Again Sunder shifted in her hand, becoming the heavy dagger she already knew so well, already despised, already needed. She glanced about her, saw Jassion, Irrial, and Guildmistress Mavere all watching.

Still on her knees, she ran a finger across the tiny feathered body that lay nearby. It rocked beneath her touch, one wing falling open to reveal mottled patches of bare skin between clinging feathers.

"There's so much I don't understand, so many lies Kaleb-Khanda?-told me. You'll explain it to me?" It seemed directed to the room at large, rather than any one soul. "All of it?"