David Farland - Chaosbound

But she was bitterly disappointed.

As the last human warrior crumpled to his knees and let out a mewling cry, like a child troubled by nightmares, Crull-maldor told herself: There are millions of humans in the barrens now. Perhaps among them I will find a worthy foe.

Her wyrmling troops feasted upon fresh man-flesh that evening, and then prepared a few captured humans for the arena, stripping them naked lest they have any concealed weapons.

That was when Crull-maldor found the markings upon the humans’ champion. His skin bore scars from a branding iron, and upon the warrior’s flesh she saw ancient glyphs, primal shapes that had formed the world from the beginning.

Crull-maldor studied a glyph—actually four glyphs all bound into a circle. The largest was the rune for might, but attached to it were other smaller glyphs—seize, confer, and bind.

The lich lord had never seen such scars before, but instinctively she knew what they meant. It was a spell of some nature, a type of parasitical magic, which caused attributes from one being to be imbued upon another.

This is a new form of magic, she realized, one with untold potential. She suspected that she could duplicate the spells, even improve upon them, if she knew more. With mounting excitement she pored over the champion’s other scars: speed, dance, resilience. Four types of runes were represented, and Crull-maldor immediately knew that she could devise others that the humans had not anticipated.

Suddenly, the humans and their new magic took on great import in her mind.

She did not know if she should reveal what she had found to the emperor. Perhaps he already knew about this strange magic. Perhaps he would never know—until after Crull-maldor had mastered it.

So far today, she had not heard from the emperor. Certainly he had witnessed the great change wrought upon the world. Other wyrmling fortresses would be reporting the sightings of humans.

But if things were amiss in the capitol at Rugassa, Crull-maldor had not been forewarned.

Probably, she thought, the emperor will not tell me anything. He hopes that I will fail, that I will embarrass myself, so that he will look better in return.

It had always been this way. Their rivalry had lasted for more than four hundred years.

But at the moment, Crull-maldor suspected that she had the upper hand.

I could just tell him that humans have come, she thought, and not warn him of the dangers of confronting them.

She liked that. A half-truth oft served better than a lie.

But she decided to wait. She didn’t need to report the incursion instantly.

Little of import happened that day. One of he wyrmling captains reported a strangeness: some of her subjects claimed to recall life on another world, the world that had fallen from above. They wished to leave the fortress, head south to their own homes.

Crull-maldor ordered that all such people be put to death. There was no escaping the wyrmling horde.

So she waited until after sundown, when the long shadows stretched into full darkness and bats began to weave about the citadel in their acrobatic hunt.

Stars glowered overhead, the fiery eyes of heaven, and a cool and salty breeze breathed over the land.

With the coming of night, the spirits of the land rose from their hiding places.

A second human army was gathering for the night, soldiers from far places riding horses to the towers. Crull-maldor did not want to leave her wyrmlings defenseless, yet she needed to gain information.

So while the armies began to surround her fortress, Crull-maldor dropped from the citadel and went floating beneath the starlight, weaving her way between boulders, drifting above the gorse and bracken.

Field mice felt the cold touch of her presence, and went hopping for their burrows.

Hares thumped their feet to warn their kind. Then they would either hold still, hoping that she passed, or race for the shelter of the gorse.

Nothing substantial had lived here—until today. Nothing substantial could have lived here. Crull-maldor had been cheating death for centuries, living as a shade, a creature that was nearly pure spirit. But to hold on to the spark of life, to stay in communion with the world of fleshy creatures, required tremendous power, power that could only be gained by drawing off the life force of others.

Thus, on a normal night, as she wound her way through the bracken, Crull-maldor would have touched a rabbit here, drained a bush there, or cut short the song a cricket as she passed.

She would have left a trail of death and silence in her wake. But to night she felt sated, for she had fed upon the spirits of men.

Her mind was not upon the hunt for food that evening, but upon the hunt for information. Her eyes could see beyond the physical realm. Indeed, she was so far gone toward death that she could not easily perceive the physical world anymore, unless she happened to be riding in the mind of a crow or a wolf.

Now she passed through the wilds in a daze, as if moving through a dream.

More immediate, more real to her, were the perceptions of her spirit. She could see into the dead world easily, a world that had always been a mystery to mortals.

They lived here in the Northern Wastes, the dead did—in these so called “barrens.” Most of the time, the dead prefer to isolate themselves from the living, for living men often hold powerful auras that confuse and trouble the dead.

So the dead had built cities that seemed to be sculpted from light and shadow. Great towers rose up all around her in shades that the mortal eye cannot see—the rose colors of dawn, the deepest purples of twilight, and shades of fire that no mortal can imagine.

Soaring arches spanned the streets, with flowering vines cascading from them, while great fountains spurted up in broad plazas that seemed to be paved with a pale mist.

What a living wyrmling imagined was only a barren waste was in fact the home to millions.

But to night in the spirit world, much had changed. There had been one city here yestereve. Now Crull-maldor saw towers everywhere, rising above the plains. Hosts of human dead had come.

Their women shrieked for joy and children laughed, while minstrels played in far pavilions.

The spirits of the dead celebrated here, the shades of humans and wyrmlings mingling together, oblivious of the living world—just as the living world was oblivious of them.

So the lich lord wafted above streets of mellow haze, into the House of Light, and there came upon a great convocation of elders, mixed with scholars from the human world.

Crull-maldor did not see them with her physical eyes; instead she perceived their spirits, like spiny sea urchins created from light. Each spirit was a small round ball with thousands of white needle-like appendages that issued out in every direction.

Each spirit had the memory of its fleshly form draped over it like a cloak, showing dimly remembered exteriors. Thus, the balls of light hovered about inside the shells of wyrmling lords and men.

Crull-maldor went to the most glorious among them—a human woman who shone with tremendous brilliance, a symbol of her wisdom and power.

Then the lich lord seized the woman. Crull-maldor sent a tendril of light coiling out from her own spirit, and penetrated the woman’s field. The lich took the woman by the umbilicus and twisted, causing the woman untold pain.

Once again, Crull-maldor found the act to be surprisingly easy. A spiritual attack upon such a powerful being should normally have required great concentration. But now it felt like child’s play.

“Tell me what you know!” Crull-maldor demanded.

The woman shrieked, and the color of her spindles of light suddenly changed from bright white to a delicious deep red. She recoiled, and all of the tendrils around her nucleus shrank in on themselves, the way that the arms of sea anemone will do when something brushes against it.