The Emerald Blade by Steven Kelliher

Author:Steven Kelliher [Kelliher, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy
Publisher: Steven Kelliher
Published: 2017-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

T’Alon felt pain.

And though his skin had been torn and blistered by the unnatural frost the Witch had sent against him, it was the pain on the backs of his eyes he still remembered. It was the pain of his own fire reflected back from the melted and iced-over surface of the snowy terrain on which they were fighting.

Was this what it was like to burn?

The combatants—his shrinking band and that of the Witch and her followers—had coated the snow with red. What had been a sea of glittering, pristine whiteness only that morning was now something ugly and stained. The soft fire of the distant sun that had greeted the rises and eddies to begin the day had given way to the judging eye of dusk, and T’Alon had brought his own sun with him of a much harder sort.

For many, the way of dreams took them by winding pathways to revelations, the roads twisting and turning back in on themselves, creating circles that illuminated. It was not so in his dreams. In his dreams, the focus drew steadily, piercingly inward until there was little difference between then and now.

He remembered the thrill of meeting a foe worthy of his challenge. He had delighted in it, knowing he could feel the shame for having enjoyed it later, after the killing was done. And though the killing was at the behest of another, he had played his part long enough to believe that the endless War of Sages was as much his as theirs.

He remembered her face. Though they had called her a witch, she had shown none of the weirdness that defined them in lore—histories passed into fables told to children in the night. Her face stood out like a peach, a rush of life and color against the blank backdrop of her lands. Her eyes were the blue of the azure water found nestled in the tallest of the black crags in the western deserts, so deep they obscured the black at their center.

And all of it was framed by a shock of yellow T’Alon had never seen imitated among any of the peoples to the south—least of all his own swarthy, sun-baked folk.

In truth, he remembered her face because it reminded him of the one he’d taken from her. And though she had ducked and darted behind the frost-spiked walls she had conjured and the endless bottoms she had opened in the snowy plains, his fire had been concentrated on the one who called her consort—on the Northern Sage himself.

Resh had led the charge. She was fast. Faster even than Shadow, though she never left the World to find it. She was fearless, too. And cunning.

She was Landkist, blessed with a weightlessness she turned at will and gifted with the unbending and unbreaking skin of the river peoples to the south. Where the Eastern Dark had found her, T’Alon had never learned. She was the last, likely. They were, each of them, different sorts of lasts in that company, and it was a company grown less bitter by margins when she joined it.

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