had come to a place where there was water in the stream bed, and had stumbled on the wet rocks. New pain. New fear.
This one would be a rich feast indeed.
He began to move forward quickly, ready to close the distance between them and claim his prize-when suddenly the earth-fae surged, spraying droplets of ice-blue power high into the air. He blinked against the brightness of it even as drops began to fall like rain all around him, an eerie glowing shower. As they touched him, knowledge came rushing unbidden into his brain. Not the kind of ordered, rational knowledge he might have summoned with a Working. This information was raw-unstructured-a mad chaos of data that roared down the avenues of his consciousness, drowning out all other thought.
He knew exactly where his quarry was wounded, and exactly how life-threatening each wound was. He understood the nature of her pain, her faith, her fear. A lifetime of her memories rushed into his head, images cascading into one another with such speed and force that his mind reeled as it struggled to absorb them. A child’s nightmares-a teenager’s distress-a grown woman’s loss-a knight’s desperation. A thousand and one battles unfolded in his mind, fought against nightmares and bullies and despots and rivals and faeborn demons, too much for any sane mind to absorb. Instinctively he reached out for power, knowing that he must erect some sort of barrier to protect himself from the mad deluge of emotion before it breached the boundaries of his own soul. It was a sorcerer’s reflex, performed without even thinking-and it was also a deadly error, whose carelessness he cursed even as the full force of the Forest’s fae came crashing into his brain.
Hot power seared his soul-nightmare energies bursting up from the ground to engulf him-followed by a cold so intense that it froze the blood in his undead veins. It was a dark and terrible power, an amalgam of earth-fae and dark fae such as Tarrant had never known before, utterly unstable in nature. A whirlwind of power began to take shape around him, metaphysical forces manifesting on the physical plane. Winds began to whip about him with cyclonic force, and within seconds he was trapped in a cocoon of flying debris, splinters of wood and shards of stone scoring his flesh as they were driven past him.
And the Forest’s hunger poured into him. It was not a human hunger, nor anything a sane man would recognize, but something far more primal: a driving environmental need that arose from the land itself. This was the soul of the Forest, this mad, insatiable emptiness that was driven to absorb every human soul within its borders, hungry to drink in every source of vital energy that came within its reach. And now Tarrant had invited it into his soul. Shards of dead men’s memories flashed before his eyes as the storm ripped his soul to pieces, tearing loose bits of his past history so that they might be digested. A few shattered fragments of the woman’s memories flashed by him as well-he had not had time to banish them-but the Forest did not care whose they were. Its hunger was mindless and indiscriminating.
His legs lost all their strength and collapsed beneath him, but the pain as his knees struck the ground was a distant thing, peripheral to the war that was taking place within his own body. The fae was twisting each cell of his body into a new configuration, burning away the biological codes that safeguarded his physical identity and replacing them with patterns that reflected its own warped essence. Tarrant doubled over in agony as his internal organs began to pull loose from their moorings, and he could feel his bones warp and crack as they were forced into a new and terrible template. Just as Amoril’s had been.
But he was not Amoril.
In the small part of Tarrant’s brain that could still think clearly, he knew what he had to do. And he also knew just how dangerous it would be, and what would happen to him if he failed. Amoril’s mutation was but a pale shadow by comparison.
But he had not given over his soul to darkness four centuries ago and destroyed all that he once held dear only to become a mindless beast now.
Opening his soul wide-dismantling all the defenses that would normally protect him-he embraced the fae.
Power rushed into his soul and he welcomed it, wrapping the force of his will around it even as he drew it deeper into himself. It complied hungrily, eager to consume him. He could sense the boundaries of his physical identity giving way, and for a moment raw panic welled up inside him. This was where Amoril had faltered, when his own fear had unmanned him. But Tarrant was not that weak, nor would he allow himself to be distracted, even by the dissolution of his own body. He had wrestled with demons in the past, waged war against jealous gods, and once-long ago-bargained with forces so dark in nature, so utterly toxic in their essence, that no living creature could stand before them. And he had survived all that. He was still here. He’d be damned now if he’d let a simple patch of woodland defeat him, fae or no fae.
You are mine, he thought fiercely. As he began to force his own imprint upon the fae, to mold it into a form of his choosing. For a moment the two powers were deadlocked against one another, as he pitted all the force of his human intellect against the Forest’s raw strength… and then, at last, he felt it begin to yield. It was only a flicker of weakness at first, but that was all he needed; he pressed forward with all the strength he could muster, struggling to impress his will upon the invading power… to make it his. Fresh pain shot through his flesh as his body began to reshape itself once more, returning to its original form, but it was the pain of victory, and he embraced it gladly.
And then, at last, it was all over.
He found that he was hunched over on the ground, much as Amoril had been during his own transformation. As he checked out his limbs to make sure they were all in their proper form-they were-he tried not to think about how close he had just come to sharing the albino’s fate.
The winds were gone now, and only a circle of fallen debris bore witness to the storm of energy that had so recently surrounded him. His sword was on the ground nearby; he must have drawn it during his struggle. The coldfire blade flickered weakly now, its power drained. He picked it up and rose unsteadily to his feet. His legs were weak but they were functional, and all his body parts seemed to be moving as they should. Good enough. He could still feel the Forest’s presence in the back of his mind, a hunger simmering just below the threshold of his consciousness, but for the moment it was no longer a threat to him.
Satisfied, he resheathed his sword.
Looking around, he realized that the Forest felt different to him now. Less chaotic. More alive. For a moment he stood still, trying to put his finger on exactly what had changed. When he finally realized what it was, he drew in a sharp breath. The trees had not been altered, nor the beasts that lurked the shadows, nor even the currents of fae at his feet… but he had.
He could sense the heartbeat of the Forest now, an amalgam of living energies that throbbed just below the threshold of consciousness, binding all creatures within its borders to a single purpose. He sensed the nightmare- born energy that flowed through the earth like blood, and the vast network of metaphysical veins that channeled them. And it seemed to him that he could sense every creature within the Forest as well-fleshborn and faeborn, living and undead-though it was hard to pick out any one entity from the chaos of data.
And he could sense the woman.
She was thirsty. So thirsty. She had found a source of water and was cupping her hand to bring mouthfuls of it up to her lips, but the thirst was rooted deep in her damaged flesh and had more to with lost blood and exhaustion than with simple dryness. Nevertheless he could taste her pleasure as she drank, and even the flicker of hope that she allowed herself, having found such refreshment. A dim hope, but she wielded it like a shield to ward off the fear that might otherwise make it impossible for her to continue. Such a strong soul.
When she began to move again he was aware of her as the Forest was aware of her, through the thousands of living creatures that were impacted by her presence. He could feel the weight of her foot pressing down against insects in the earth, the warmth of her body brushing against trees, the stirring of leaves in response to her breath. And then there was her fear. Waves of it rippling out into the night, washing over him in a sweet black tide. He shut his eyes to savor the sensation, and he could sense predators stirring in the shadows that surrounded him, responding to his arousal. Then he opened his eyes and placed his hand on a nearby tree branch, and it, too, responded to him; the bark running down one side of it contracted, and it curled back on itself like a snake.
Hunt with me, the Forest seemed to whisper. Feed us both.
He was not so drunk on the moment that he forgot the danger he was in. What the Forest had failed to accomplish in a direct contest of strength it might still manage by seduction. Its nature demanded that it subsume all creatures within its boundaries, and if he gave it the right opening it might yet succeed.
