“She’s dead, Trell.” Just saying that made Kara cold. “We killed her. All we can do now is find King Haven and warn him.”
Sera pulled away. “I can’t—“
“You’re not dying.” Kara grabbed her hands and squeezed hard. “I won’t allow it. We’ll fix this.”
“How?”
“There has to be a way. We’re going to find it.”
Trell reached over Jyllith and gripped Kara’s shoulder. “Then you must rest. Both of you. I’ll take this woman away and bury her while you make camp. Tomorrow, when you are both well, we will walk out of Highridge Pass, find help, and save all of Mynt.”
Trell made things simple. Kara treasured that, even on a night as horrible as this. She wished it made things better, but nothing could. What she had done tonight could never be undone.
That was when Kara realized Jair was nowhere to be seen. Where had he run off too? Was he so disgusted by this that he had left?
“Yes,” Sera said. “We can bury her. She was a thrice-cursed inhuman bitch, but we can do at least that much.”
A male scream ripped through the air. Kara tried to rise but fell forward instead, collapsing in a heap. Sera gripped her and stared into the night. Trell crouched and drew his broadsword.
“Jair,” Sera whispered. “Five take me. I can’t feel Jair.”
Unsteady feet shuffled toward them, and Kara saw Jair stumbling closer. Why couldn’t she feel him on their dyn disc?
Jair stopped a few paces distant, head still down. Trell rose with his sword ready. “Jair? What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“Kara.” Jair raised his head. “You’re going to save the world.” His eyes were milky white, like the eyes of a beached corpse.
Trell gasped as the earth opened beneath him. Buried him alive. Sera shrieked as invisible hands ripped her from Kara’s arms. Then quicksand mixed itself beneath Kara and buried her up to her neck.
“Trell!” Kara shouted. “Sera!” She couldn’t find them anywhere. She had to find her friends and save them.
Towering figures in red plate armor strode from the darkness all around her. Foot-long spikes jutted from their shoulder plates. A figure in red robes led them, an elder. Jyllith’s elder.
Jair backed into the dark forms as the robed elder approached. Kara could not lose, not now. Not so close to the end!
“Kara Tanner.” The elder spoke in a voice she recognized, even though she could not place it. “Or should I say, Kara Honuron?”
Who was he? How did she know him? Why couldn’t she remember who he was?
“This struggle is over. No one else has to die. I’ll explain everything soon.” The elder raised one bloody finger and scribed sleep glyphs that latched onto her soul. “You’re safe now.”
Kara very much doubted that.
HE CLAWED AT THE DIRT. It slipped between his fingers as air roared in his ears. Coughing tore his body apart.
He lived for one purpose — to drag himself across rock. He could not see. Why couldn’t he see? Something had hurt him — that much he remembered — but he recalled very little else. Just fire and pain.
His eyes tingled as specks of red danced before him, as he pushed his left arm up. Contracted his fingers. Pulled. Breathed. Pushed his right arm up. Pulled. Breathed.
“Stop,” someone told him. “Rest.”
He did that. He rested. He flipped onto what he thought was his back and stared at the red specks. It was becoming easier to live, but this was not necessarily good. He didn’t know if he wanted to live. Not if he was going to live in the agony he remembered.
A memory came then. A tall woman with piercing orange eyes. Her gaze bored into him as flames charred his skin and broiled his flesh. She seared the skin right off his bones.
That one image was all he could remember from the time before the crawling. His eyes burned as he ground his rough, scratchy fists into them. He heard mill saws shrieking beyond his head.
“Enough,” the voice said again, faint and female. “Be still and breathe. The worst of it is over, for now.”
He forced his hands from his eyes and tried to open them. Nothing happened. There was nothing to open.
“Can you understand me?” the voice asked.
He only shifted in response. When he did so, gentle Fingers of Breath lifted him from the rough earth. Their touch felt cool, and he whimpered at that kindness. It made him want to curl up and die.
Something inside him railed at his weakness. He had always been weak, for as long as he could remember. Long ago a name had given him great pride: Aryn. He focused on that. On Aryn Locke.
A man who by all rights should still be very dead.
“You will never again be what you were before,” the soft female voice told him. “Yet you are Heat’s Champion. You must help me.”
Aryn wanted to laugh, but his throat no longer worked. Help her? He couldn’t even walk.
He took the dream world since he had no other way to see. It revealed high jagged walls of brown lines, the walls of Highridge Pass, and one twisted aura of green. A spirit. A woman long dead.
Yet how could a spirit glyph? How could she soothe him with tendrils of air? Something else was going on here, something he did not understand and had never encountered.
“Who…” The word tore at his throat. “What are you?”
“Will you help me, Aryn?” The spirit woman had his name now, yet he did not have hers. That bothered him. “Will you accept Heat’s charge and serve our world as he intended?”
Her dream form grew brighter as Aryn continued to stare. He was alive, but unsure what that meant. Some of what had come before was returning now. A flash of phantom pain bloomed in his chest.
Balazel. Balazel had taken him, roasting him alive in fire. Driving stakes into his flesh. Balazel had tortured him, and Aryn could not think of anything else. They called Balazel the Prince of Pain.
Aryn twitched and jerked as the spirit layered more tendrils of air over his skin. He had been hurting for a very long time and no longer knew how to do anything else. He wheezed, whimpered, cried.
“Enough.” The spirit knelt beside him and painted more glyphs, resting her hands on his head. “Be still.”
White flashed. Aryn felt fingers digging through his head and wanted to scream. One by one, his memories of fire and pain faded.
They didn’t vanish — they were seared deeply into his mind — but they were washed out, now. Like horror stories he had heard. Like things that had happened to someone else.
Soon enough, the feel of fingers ended. The white faded. Aryn took the dream world as his trembling eased. He had been in the Underside. He remembered that. He remembered very little else.
“Aryn.” The spirit knelt beside him. “What do you remember?”
Aryn found his voice. “I burned.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere.”
“I had not imagined the damage went so deep. It would have been better if Kara had burned you to ash, forced Heat to choose another, but better is not always an option we have.”
“Why can’t I see?”
“You have crawled from the mouth of a demon. Heat pulled you from the Underside. You are the second champion of the Five to live again, and you owe your life and allegiance to them. To me.”
Aryn remembered Jyllith staring into his eyes, snickering gnarls clustered all around them. He remembered the robed elder watching as Aryn carved a blood glyph on his own chest, hand shaking.
“If I serve you, will I get to kill the man who did this to me?”
The spirit leaned close. “What has hatred earned you thus far?”
Aryn wanted the tendrils of air off his body. It happened in a moment. He stood and air could not touch him. How? The green dream form drifted back.
“Heat’s strength grows inside you even now.” She sounded a touch worried. “Can you feel his power?”
Aryn ran his hands over his bare chest, seared flesh over seared flesh. He felt the puckers, the scars, the blisters. Wet pus. His skin felt like seared meat, and it couldn’t look much better.
Once, before Balazel, he had been a man with raven hair that was equal to that of the finest noble in Tarna. He had a face and body that made women swoon when he but turned his eyes their way. Now he was a walking mass of charred and blistered flesh.
At least his head was a normal size once more. His shape was human, even if nothing else was. Human enough to walk off a cliff. He had never asked to live again, especially not like this.
“Thank you for helping me.” He strode away, blistered feet tender and sore. “I’m leaving now.
The spirit drifted after him. “I cannot let you end yourself. You attended Solyr, so you must know the story of the Five, of Torn, of the end of the All Province War. You are Heat’s Champion, and you know what that means. You have a responsibility to our world.”
Aryn raised his hand and fire burst to life in his open palm. He stared at the flame, turned it and stoked it. It hovered in his hand, light as a feather and hot as a sun. He had not scribed any glyph.
Aryn shuddered and dropped his hand. Traces of scattered memory threatened to paralyze him, murky images of Balazel’s thick hands dragging him into a pit. Aryn suffered flashes of pokers stabbing him, heated blades flaying his skin, one terrifying image after another. All of it felt disconnected and wrong.
“You did something,” Aryn said. “You changed my memories.”
“I made you sane. I suppressed the worst of the torture you experienced, and I can do more if you serve me. I can make you forget it all, everything that happened to you in the Underside. But only if you help me stop the man who did this to you.”
“You can erase memories. Like Trell’s?”
The spirit didn’t answer, but it didn’t have to. Aryn knew now who this was. This spirit, or mage, or creature — it could change memories, even erase them. It had done this to Trell, and that was the reason Trell could not remember who he was.
Was that why this spirit was stalking him? Had Trell refused its cries for aid, for unquestioned allegiance to the Five, like Aryn was now? Would this spirit erase his mind if he balked?
“Aryn,” the spirit said, “I will not take any memories you do not wish me to take, and besides, I could not even if I wanted to. What little power I could muster is already spent.”
“Why should I help anyone?”
“Because you know the horrors Heat pulled you from as well as I. Do you truly want the souls of our world to suffer as you did? Or will you help me save them?”
“I don’t even know what you are!”
“You know I want to help. You know you won’t find any truth if you walk away from me, and if you wish my name, I will give it. I am Melyssa Honuron.”
Aryn stared. Melyssa Honuron was Torn's wife, one of the only survivors of his expedition to Terras. That expedition had stopped the Mavoureen and saved the world.
Talking to spirits was Jair’s domain, not his. How could he know if this was truth? Aryn realized it didn’t matter. His life had already been erased. He had no brothers left, no friends. All that remained was this charred shell, alone and pathetic.
“So you want me to save the world? You think I’m a hero?”
“I want you to fight for your world and your friends. I want you to save Kara Honuron, my great-granddaughter.”
“Kara? Honuron?” It finally made sense. Kara’s incredible proficiency with glyphs. The strength of her blood. Aryn had been measuring himself against the most powerful line of mages in all the Five Provinces.
It almost made him feel better about losing to her.
“We must save her, Aryn. And we have to save the woman you love. We must save Sera.”
Aryn almost cried out. How could he have forgotten Sera? He loved her. He had to find her, protect her from meeting his fate. That was why he had thrown himself into the Underside in the first place.
“Even now the forces that hope to end this world hold Sera, along with Kara and your other friends. Jair and Trell. They will all die if you don’t help me. Are you ready now?”
“How will you help them when you’re already dead?”
“I live still. The one who has been hunting you ... the Champion of the Mavoureen ... stole my body more than a week ago, when we fought outside Solyr. He did not kill me because he feared that if he did, the Five would take me as a champion. I would destroy him.”
“Then how are you here?”
“I’ve learned to project my soul beyond my body for short periods. It’s a trick Torn taught me, decades ago. I can draw upon my body’s blood, to a degree, and scribe just as I could in my physical form, but the effort is taxing. Each glyph costs me tenfold.”
Aryn could not imagine spending blood as casually as this woman did. He did not know if he could survive it, but Melyssa Honuron — she was a legend. The greatest Bloodmender in Mynt’s history.
And her husband had been everything short of a god.
“My body is with him now,” Melyssa said. “The man who did this to you. He doesn’t know I can project, but it did me little good until I found you. I can lead you to him. We can kill him together.”
Aryn opened his hands and roiling flames sprang into being. Whatever he was now, he was far more powerful than he had been before he died. He might even be powerful enough to save Sera.
“Aryn?” Melyssa asked.
“Lead me to them.” Aryn turned his dream world gaze to the pass ahead. “As for saving the world, well…” He extinguished his flames. “Let’s take this one step at a time, shall we?”
“BOY.”
The voice came from far away, and Byn listened. It was not dangerous, and took no more effort than floating in a salty sea.
“I know you hear me. There’s no holding off the poison’s will any longer. You have a davenger’s curse in you. Demon blood. You can help me push it out or you can die.”
Byn pondered that.
“I thought I was already dead.”
“Maybe for a bit. You’re back now, but sinking, and faster than you think. Is that what you want?”
“I didn’t know I had a choice.”
“We all have a choice. So few grasp it when they can.”
“It hurts to move. It’s peaceful here.”
“If peace is what you crave, I can allow you to cross. Living will not be easy for you.
”
“What do you mean?”
“Even if we drive this poison out, you will never be the man you were before. I found a strong, able-bodied lad by Torn’s Teeth. One who’d seen years plowing a field or rowing a ship. You’ll never regain your strength. You’ll be lucky to walk again.”
“You think I should cross?”
“If I could decide that for you, my regrets about life would be that much simpler. It’s your choice. Is there nothing in this world that binds you? No friends to return to, no lover to mourn your death?”
Those words stirred something within Byn he had not felt before. He remembered the sensation of a soft hand stroking his cheek, warm lips brushing his own. If he stayed forever buried in this earth, he would never feel her warm touch again.
“I’m coming back. What must I do?”
“Climb out of that cocoon. Climb toward my voice.”
Leaving the cocoon was easy enough, and Byn found himself wriggling through damp earth as easily as an earthworm. The effort it took to move increased as he climbed, however, and soon the damp earth hardened around him. Rocks poked his sides.
“That’s good.” Old Voice remained far above. “Life’s coming back to you. You must think about life, those you love, those who care for you. Things you did and things you will do. Not the pain.”
Byn remembered the apple trees in his grandfather’s orchard in Hyle as they blossomed in spring. He remembered the way the setting sun tinted the ocean a brilliant orange. He remembered a beautiful young woman with dark hair and green eyes.