Chapter 7: Blue Sky Thunder

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Falazar pushed Ryelle hard. The statuette tucked deep within his robes was growing warm. It should last a full day, he had calculated.

The wind was a solid wall, tearing at his robes, whipping tears from his eyes, threatening to rip him from his perch between her powerful wings. Below, Argren’s heartlands blurred by in greens and browns. They covered distances with a speed that defied belief, an hour of flight devouring a day’s hard ride for the swiftest royal messenger.

By midmorning they were over Woodhall; the outer town was a collection of empty streets and blackened, collapsed roofs. Beyond its northern walls lay a vast, ugly stain on the wintery landscape: the goblin camp. Thousands crawled in a city of filth, their cook-fires a hundred sullen eyes staring back. They were biding their time, stalled by the muddy slush of melted snow and their recent defeat, waiting for the moment to strike again.

Falazar urged Ryelle further north, then east, following the faint psychic trail of Ronigren’s party. The world below transformed into a monochrome nightmare. The villages were charred shells. The land withered beneath layers of sorcery. Then goblin wards forced him to veer west, towards jagged, snow-dusted peaks.

They skirted the very edge of the Scablands; a blighted wound on the face of the world. The sky was a bruised, sickly purple, the clouds thick and unnatural, swirling with sorcerous energies.

Ghastly featherless things approached, shadowed his flight, a bird’s nightmares given form with pale skin stretched taut over bird-like frames bigger than a man. Their heads were bald, their eyes large, black, and full of a cold hunger. Their many-jointed legs ended in wicked talons.

“Faster, Ryelle!” came Falazar’s raw shout against the wind.

But the creatures were swift. Two of them broke from their circling pattern and dove.

Ryelle let out a defiant shriek and, in a stomach-lurching dive, folded her wings and plummeted, threatening to tear Falazar’s robes from his body. He held on for dear life, his knuckles white, heart hammering against his ribs.

She met the first scout with a raking pass of her lion-like claws, tearing it from the sky in a spray of ichorous fluid. She twisted, and her powerful beak snapped shut on the second creature’s neck with a sickening CRUNCH.

It lasted mere seconds. The two foul hunters tumbled from the sky, broken, lifeless things swallowed by the swirling clouds below.

Ryelle let out a cry of triumph then banked, resuming her relentless flight north. Falazar, heart pounding, robes in tatters, offered a prayer of thanks to whatever forgotten god still listened. He had survived, but the sky was now a hunting ground.

The roar of the wind drowned the insidious thought. He felt alive. He travelled now a route he had avoided for centuries, a scar on his personal map. Names of the cities and towns he had known in his youth resurfaced in his memory. Arath-Tor. Silverwood. Northgate. They were now just ghosts, suffocated under a blanket of sorcerous malaise, home to gods-knew-what twisted, blighted horrors.

To his right lurked the northern fringes of the blighted swamplands, the K’Tahn’Corr. Even from this height, the air that drifted up felt oppressive, cloying, carrying old grief. A wave of despair from the Sorrow Marshes washed against the shields of his mind, and he shook it off with a grim effort of will.

But then, as they cleared the bounds of the world he knew, a boyish wonder ran through him. They emerged into a windswept highland uncharted on any of his maps, a land of forgotten kingdoms and half-remembered stories from his youth. And even from this great height the imprint of the Jotunai was stark. Perfectly straight, wide roads, cracked and overgrown, cut across the landscape in geometric patterns of breathtaking scale. The ruins of a civilization that had thought in terms of mountains and millennia.

Nestled within this landscape like hardy mosses on a dead tree, sparse settlements sprouted in small clusters of yurts and longhouses, their smoke a thin, defiant thread drifting against empty skies. Pockets of life still clung to this forgotten world.

The statuette was burning now, its power draining with every league they flew. The end of his borrowed wings approached.

Closing his eyes, ignoring the buffeting wind, he reached out with his mind. Hugin’s beacon was a steady if distant pulse. Beneath it, a more complex, more… irritated… signature. The buzzing of a mind wrestling with concepts far beyond its usual ken. Artholan. They were there. And they were close. He sent a pulse towards them. I am coming.

Sensing her master’s intent Ryelle let out a triumphant cry that echoed off snow-capped peaks. She angled her great wings and begun her descent, a golden thunderbolt slashing down the anaemic sky.

They passed a patchwork of rich, dark fields crisscrossed by meticulously maintained brooks and irrigation channels. The water ran clear and cold here, with a soothing murmur.

Xylia-Kai kneeled by one such channel, trailing her webbed fingers in the cool water.

Myanaa walked to stand beside Astrid.

“Your magic is in the land itself, is it not?”

“You have a keen sense, Whisper-Kin,” she replied, “The earth is our partner, such is the old way. The Jotunai way, though our own art is an echo of what it once was.”

“Before the army,” Myanaa found herself saying, “I was a field-tender on my family’s farm in the northern heartlands. The soil there… it grew tired. Hard. It took all my skill to coax a meager harvest from it. I wish I had this wisdom back then.”

Their path led them to the heart of the settlement, a circle of well-trodden grass. At its center, moss-covered standing stones surrounded a majestic tree stump easily fifteen feet across, its gnarled wood polished smooth by time and use.

Upon this carved throne sat a woman. Middle-aged, stern, her long, silver-streaked hair intricately braided with twine and polished river stones. Flanking her on either side on smaller, rough-hewn wooden stools, were two men. Both were broad-shouldered, their faces weathered, their hands calloused from hard labor.

As Astrid led them into the circle, Ronigren noted the people who had gathered to watch. Almost all were of the same uncanny, in-between stature as Astrid and Brynja, but interspersed amongst them were one or two of human size.

There was no fawning from the villagers gathered, but no overt hostility either.

Astrid approached the seated woman. “Mother, I bring travelers from the south. They carry a heavy burden, and a story that you must hear.”

The woman took measure of each of them, her eyes lingering for a moment on the gauntlets slung over Ronigren’s back.

Ronigren felt the weight of her scrutiny but could not bring himself to meet it. He was a thousand leagues away, on a bloody stage in Alkaer, his duty here a distant, muffled obligation.

A sudden pressure on his arm. Astrid gave his bicep a firm, playful squeeze. “Don’t be shy now, Knight,” She smiled a bright, playful challenge, with a twinkle in her clear blue eyes.

He pulled his arm away, a flush of heat rising on his neck, then glanced around and saw, to his irritation, Gregan’s wide grin. He then caught Sabine watching him with one perfectly arched eyebrow up.

Ronigren cleared his throat. “Honored Matriarch―“

He was cut short by a shout.

“He’s here! But how?!”

Artholan was pointing a trembling finger towards the sky.

Sounds of commotion rippled through the valley. The distant bleating of sheep turned into panicked cries. The steady clang of the blacksmith’s hammer ceased. From the south, shouts of alarm carried on the clear mountain air.

The matriarch and her two men jumped to their feet.

A high, thin, sizzling sound vibrated in Ronigren’s teeth and bones. Even those not initiated in the arcane arts could feel a palpable pressure.

A golden speck, high in the grey sky, descended at impossible speed. It grew larger, resolving itself into a winged beast. A golden-feathered griffin.

Ronigren stared, his heart hammering against his ribs, a name forming on his lips.

Falazar.