3.8 KiB
The climb left blood in her boots.
Mournpeak, the sacred height, rose not like a mountain but like the carcass of a god—its flanks jagged with obsidian ribs, its ridges gnawed by endless winter. The breath of the summit stank of ozone and old ash, and as Telaryn neared the crest, the world grew quiet—not with peace, but with the terrible hush before something ancient opens its eyes.
Ashmire pulsed faintly against her spine. It thirsted, even here. Especially here.
The summit was a bowl of broken stone, ringed by leaning cairns that whispered in no wind. The snow did not fall, but circled, as if drawn into some slow, inevitable vortex. In the center of the bowl, an old sigil had been carved into the rock long ago and since worn smooth by countless storms—but some faint gleam of silver still clung to the runes, as though even time had not dared erase them entirely.
Telaryn stepped into the circle.
“I am Telaryn,” she said. Her voice echoed—once, then vanished as if devoured. “Queen’s blood in me. Doomblade at my hand. I call you.”
The air grew heavy.
Then came the wind.
Not a gust. Not a howl. A presence.
The storm descended like a living thing—its core a churning gyre of snow and sleet and thunder. It moved not with grace, but with intent, forming the shape of an impossible bird with wings a league wide, its feathers razors of frozen air. No eyes, but the sense of being watched by something that had once torn mountains down just to feel the tremor in its bones.
The wind spirit landed, and the mountain shuddered.
Opposite it, the earth cracked. Stone peeled open like flesh. From the cleft crawled something older. The mountain spirit was not shaped like a man or beast, but a mass of jagged shale, its limbs wide as walls, its chest a furnace of molten gold. Its breath hissed steam and crushed ice beneath it with each step. Moss grew and died across its surface in seconds. Lichen bloomed and blackened in time with its pulse.
It looked at her—and she felt her bones remembering being part of the earth.
Still, she stood tall. “I have come,” she said. “I bear the blade of your binder. The Queen who was.”
Ashmire pulsed in her hand, its edge weeping red light.
The wind spirit shrieked. A thousand voices at once—scorn, amusement, threat. It circled upward, talons of air dragging sparks from the cairns. The mountain spirit growled, a sound like two continents grinding together.
Their contempt was unspoken. But palpable.
They remembered the Queen.
And they did not kneel.
Telaryn gritted her teeth. She raised Ashmire, and for a moment the blade hissed like quenched metal, trying to wake the memory of domination etched into its blackened steel.
But the spirits had changed.
They were not the slaves of the old Queen anymore.
They surged.
The wind struck first, hurling her against the cairn wall. She hit hard, breath fleeing her lungs like smoke from a dying fire. Then the ground buckled beneath her—one great stone hand rising to crush her. She rolled, scrambled, Ashmire slicing sparks from the stone—but the spirits did not relent.
The storm cut her coat open in a dozen places. The cold bit deeper. Her blood felt slow, sluggish, doubtful.
Ashmire trembled.
Not with power. With hunger.
The whispers returned. Words not her own. Feed me. Prove me.
Telaryn staggered to her feet, raised the blade again—
—and the storm collapsed atop her.
Darkness. Wind. Screaming silence. The vision of herself drowning in sky, swallowed by clouds full of ash and teeth. A throne of stone sinking beneath waves of granite. A voice. Her voice? No. The Queen’s.
"You are not ready."
She fell.
The stone met her with indifference.
There, atop the sacred peak, where gods once bled and legends were forged, Telaryn of Talpis collapsed at the feet of powers she could not yet command.
The spirits watched.
And waited.