He feared his failure would anger the queen.
It did the opposite.
She smiled, lighting up his world. “Such strength. Even here, I cannot quite tame your spirit. He was right, indeed, to save you for me.”
“Kye?”
She nodded. “Yes, Kye. I imagine that if you are here, he is dead?”
“I am sorry to say that I killed him, my queen.”
“Don’t be sorry. The strong survive. If he could not stand against you, even after the gifts he’d been given, he did not deserve the place I promised at my side.”
She came closer to him and a soft floral scent filled his nostrils. He hoped to never forget that smell. “That place is now yours, if you wish it.”
Sounds of a struggle behind them reached his ears. He found it frustrating, as it interfered with his conversation.
“You helped him?”
“Of course. When he first explored the gatestone he’d taken from Zane Arrowood, he inadvertently created a connection to me. I brought him here and showed him the future. He pledged his sword, and in return, I taught him some small tricks.”
Understanding crashed over Brandt. The queen had taught Kye how to wipe memories and compel people.
She was responsible.
He felt something in his mind shifting, like a child trying to crawl out from an enormous pile of blankets. It awakened, but slowly.
“And what is the future?”
She licked her lips. “I can feel you struggle, Brandt, even if you don’t realize it. No one has held out so long in this plane. Every moment here weakens you, and still you resist.”
She leaned in until her mouth was next to his ear. She bit his earlobe, gently, then whispered, “Your will is intoxicating.”
Another wave of pleasure rolled over Brandt. He would do anything for her. Anything at all.
And yet he couldn’t swear her his fealty.
The queen gestured at the rows of soldiers staring blankly ahead. “This, Brandt. This is your future. The gate has been opened. Once you pledge yourself and you and your friend cease your struggles, I will be able to send my warriors through the gate.” She gestured to the side, where an enormous archway stood.
In many ways, it was like the gate he had seen in the cave. It was just much larger. But the makers had clearly been the same.
“And once they are through?”
“They will wreak havoc on your empire, as they should have done hundreds of years ago.”
The strands wrapped around Alena’s neck, arms, and legs. They attempted to force her once again to her knees.
Alena cut at the strands, but it felt as though she was trying to cut steel. Her knife was useless.
She almost let it go.
But she refused. If she was going to die, she wanted her father’s knife in her hands. As the strands increased their pressure, she stared at the knife.
Her father had made that for her.
Had told her that he trusted her.
The pressure surrounding her lessened.
The strands broke, cut by a bubble of energy that surrounded her. Alena stood tall and proud. She could still become the daughter that her father believed her to be.
Another set of strands reached for Alena’s heart, but the energy surrounding her let nothing through. The soulwalker let the strands die. A long knife appeared in her hand and she stepped forward, driving her knife at Alena’s chest.
The knife cut into Alena’s shield, slicing through it and reaching slowly toward her heart.
The Lolani had killed Azaleth. Perhaps the kindest soul she had ever met.
Anger grew in her, and she fought against the soulwalker, grabbing the woman’s wrist with one hand and pushing against the attack. But the knife blade kept advancing, inexorably, toward her. When the point penetrated her chest, a sweet agony rolled over her.
Alena screamed, then drove her own knife into the woman’s chest.
The soulwalker’s malicious grin vanished as Alena’s blade searched for her heart.
Their fight was one of incremental progress. Each stabbed into their opponent with one hand while trying to stop their opponent’s stab with the other.
Pain dropped Alena to her knees, the soulwalker following suit. The torment of the soulwalker’s knife cutting through her flesh was beyond bearing.
For her family.
For Azaleth’s broken dreams.
She bore the unbearable.
Their souls intertwined as they fought, the knives a representation of a more abstract battle. Alena saw the soulwalker’s childhood, a series of torturous events that left her broken but devoted to the queen.
Alena wondered what the soulwalker saw in her own past.
Would she see the family dinners and the quiet conversations she had with her father? Would she see the way the Etari patiently taught her their ways, after risking everything to adopt her?
Alena didn’t understand the flashes of memory she saw within the soulwalker. But she saw enough suffering in just a few glimpses that she could predict the results of a successful Lolani invasion.
It couldn’t happen. She wouldn’t let it happen.
With a scream, Alena put everything she had left into her knife, breaking past the soulwalker’s defense and slicing the tip of the knife into the woman’s heart.
The soulwalker died, and Alena’s soul, intertwined, traveled with her.
She found herself in a different place. Here, all was calm. There was no fight and no strife.
Those were only found within the domain of the living.
She looked up, then took a step back.
The gates.
Not the powerful portals of rock and stone that they fought the Lolani queen over.
The actual gates, a legend she had grown up with and yet never believed.
The soulwalker was here, too. She looked different somehow, with all the cares stripped from her. She smiled at Alena and walked toward the gate.
Although the gate looked to be nothing more than an arch, as soon as the soulwalker stepped through she vanished. Into what, Alena could only guess.
Alena felt a deep well of power grow within her then. She looked down at her navel, where she felt the power now resided. She tested it, manipulating her internal energies.
She felt powerful.
There
