wasted is a chance of discovery.”
They set off up the stairs and into the long corridor with heavy hearts, heavy for those left behind, the journey yet to come, and the overwhelming power of the Protectorate’s evil magic weighing down their shoulders.
Their footfalls were soft, and they met not a soul.
If the Protocrats had a soul to boast between them.
Chapter Eighty
Klan chaffed to be gone. The machinations of the Speculate held little allure for him on this day. He longed to be on the hunt. Shorn would soon be at the fire mountain. He had proven resourceful beyond all reckoning. Klan could not count on the warrior killing himself, and could not find the red wizard.
He would have to take care of the problem in front of him. It would not matter if he never found the one, if only he could kill the other.
“The rahkens rise in the south. Our forces are hard pressed, Speculate. I humbles request a greater force to aid in suppressing the uprising.”
Jek growled at Hare Osina’tha, the leader of the Tenthers, and Klan smirked privately. His Anamnesors would be able to cut the heart out of the rahken nation and reduce them to wandering leaderless in the darkness of their underground caverns. But that, he thought with another quiet smile, was not in his remit.
“You will have it,” Jek told Hare in a cold voice. “There is too much at stake to show weakness now. The ascension comes faster than we had anticipated. Already I feel the return. The old ones are coming. It is foretold in the stars. There can be no mistakes, no rising, no dissention. Put them down, Hare. You have as many warriors as you can handle. Waste no more time. Move on them. The treaty has long been broken. Find out what they are planning. Capture one if you can. Torture it. It will speak.”
“It is not as easy as it should be. Their magic is powerful, and their warriors are a match for two of ours,” complained Hare.
“But their numbers are fewer. If we have to spare a greater force, then so be it….”
The voices droned, fading into the background. Klan sensed something at the edges of his perception. He found his concentration wavering. His eyes leaked subtle power, carefully, so as not to awaken the wards in the Speculatum.
Something was wrong. Klan did not have the power of Prognostication, but he felt something approaching, sneaking up on them. A creature of power…he allowed his senses to roam Arram.
The training halls — all was well. The gates, then the walls, the fences. Nothing amiss. And yet that sense that something was wrong.
He felt it below him. Directly below.
He longed to go and see what it was. He could not penetrate the magic below, where the portals were kept. The expenditure of power to allow a portal to remain open permanently was immense. It would be impossible to travel there directly.
Suddenly it dawned on him, and it was like eyes opening to the slow light of sunrise. They were here! Their magic didn’t work in the bowels of Arram. It was them he could sense!
“Brother! They are here! It is the Sard, in the portal rooms.”
Jek face betrayed no shock, but he wasted no time. He blinked out of existence. Klan followed him, much to the consternation of the other members of the Speculate. Together, they called the guard, and sent them racing to intercept the intruders.
Neither Klan nor Jek would be of any use. In the heart of Arram they would be powerless, and neither was a warrior. To them, it might as well have been a barren place, one where magic would not work, like the Kuh’taenium, or the blasted plains of the Naum, even the great city of Beheth, which had already seen them foiled.
Jek spat orders while Klan watched. The tenthers raced from their posts as though their backs were on fire. Klan caught Jek’s eye. Together, they paced the flagstones and clenched their fists, impotent to help despite their formidable power.
There was only one place the Sard could go. Could they know which portal to take? If they had come this far, they could only assume so.
“Brother, I believe they head to the wastes. Should they win through, I will meet them there.”
Jek nodded. “Go. Do not fail the Protectorate, Klan.”
“They will not escape me this time,” said Klan, his face grim, his anger held firmly in check.
With a perfunctory bow to Jek, his master and brother ascendant, he tore a hole in the fabric of reality, and stepped once more into the void.
Chapter Eighty-One
Events spun through the universe, twisting galaxies, burning solar systems in a final flare of terrifying light as the Sun Destroyers travelled from one star to the next, endless destruction wrought, the wages of frenzied feeding on finite light.
One world barren and bare, its vampiric denizens left for good. Flown on light, from one star to the next, souls trapped in waves, waiting for their revenge.
Events had been set in motion since the banishment. Since their defeat more than two millennia in the past for those on Rythe, a mere moment or an age past for those along the way.
A sun screamed in death, its last agony told to its cousins, its brothers, its birth brood. The message sped from star to star, heralding the arrival of their blight, their bane.
Their last hope, a wizard entombed, three mortals whose only crime was to be born in a time of legend. For two thousand years, the twin suns of Rythe had waited for the return. Now the moment had come. The wizard still slumbered, but the revenant was awake. He ranted beneath the earth, stone and ice.
Three would come together. The swords had spoken, the three still lived.
In the skies above, the suns watched. They shed tears, and flames roiled across their burning surface. Suns die, too. To rest would mean the death of their children. They spawned their children. Now, it was down to them to be their saviours.
Three come as one. Priests to save them, surround them with light. The suns’ emissaries on Rythe. Could they hold back the dark?
Some say legends come again, live through the ages. Some say legends live again, as long as a sun. Some say it is mere serendipity, wishful thinking on the part of mortals who write history and myth for their progeny.
There is serendipity in all things, but on Rythe the simplest coincidence is presaged by black toothed grins and blood.
Chapter Eighty-Two
Quintal held up a hand, and they halted at a turn in the corridor.
“Quiet, now. They know we are here. There is no need for them to find us yet.”
Roth growled deep in its throat, anxious to be about the battle. “I smell them. Wait, and I will clear a path.”
“Time enough for fighting later, Roth,” Quintal told the rahken. “For now, we need to find the chamber. This blasted warren has me all turned around, but we cannot fight our way out. Hold your fury in check, until we have
