Chapter 144: A Wider View

Chapter 144: A Wider View

“Is it really over then?” Oroza asked, looking at the images the moon played upon her waters. “Is the age of man over? How long will the darkness rule this time?”

Lunaris shook her head. “The Kingdom of Hallen might encompass your whole world, Oroza, but it is but a small part of everything. The Underkingdoms are still largely intact, so I’m told, and even if the mages did not still stand, or the children of the forest, there would still be other champions. The Northern Kingdoms, the Westerlands across the sea, and even the Isles yet remain untouched, and they are just as full of heroes as anywhere else. This evil may fester and grow here, but like any fire, it will run out of fuel and exhaust itself soon enough.”

The two goddesses sat there on the small delta island looking at the moon Goddess’s scrying magic as the city burned, and crazed shadows multiplied to devour the whole place like a growing tumor. Both of them looked worse for wear after the last several years of ever-increasing violence.

Oroza’s skin and begun to wrinkle, and her hair was more than half gray now. She’d never been particularly vain, and wouldn’t have cared about that if she wasn’t so weak. The Lich’s poisoning of her watershed with saltwater via the canal was taking it toll. She’d collapsed the thing again and again, but each time, it was rebuilt, and more plants and animals that made up her little world died as a result.

The moon Goddess, by contrast, was looking as young as ever, but she was paler than usual, and she seemed thin and worn out. That was the way of things since that last terrible ambush on the moon. A full conclave of the divine had not happened since that awful night, but that didn’t bother Oroza. Someone would tell her if important things were happening, and the rest of the time, she would focus on thwarting the darkness wherever she could.

As Lunaris spoke, she waved her hand, and the nightmare that was Rahkin was replaced by a wider view of the word from high above. Oroza could only barely make out the peninsula that her river traversed as it lay there in the shadow of the Wodenspines. At this scale, it was impossible to see cities, but she knew where places like Abenend and Siddrimar must be.

She’d spent some time exiled to the oceans, where she’d prowled restlessly and devoured what ships she could find when her river had been so forcefully dried out. So, she’d known that the world was much larger than she could see from the snow-capped mountains where her headwaters originated. Still, it was one thing to know and another thing to see.

Even as vast a domain as the Lich now controlled, it wasn’t even close to the majority, and from this height, she could scarcely even see the slender tower of darkness that marked its domain.

“Does it really stretch so far up into the sky?” Oroza asked, noting the black thread that rose far above even the tallest mountains before disappearing in the night sky above the two gently glowing women.

“Indeed,” Lunaris nodded. “It goes past the domain of the wandering stars and even the fixed stars beyond them. According to the All-Father, it descends deep into the core of the earth as well. We know not what that monster plans to do with such a thing, but there are many possibilities.”

“It doesn’t seem to move or even do anything at all,‘ the river Goddess said as she dragged her fingers across the waters and dispelled the ugly illusion lest it somehow draw the dread eye of the Lich itself.

Why should she ever be in a hurry when she could linger in the mangrove roots or explore shipwrecks that had been unearthed once more after the latest storm? That had been her way for the longest time, and she missed it terribly, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from soaring now as her long, sinuous river dragon form swam with mighty strokes of its tail.

There were only a few spots she did not navigate the world like that at this point. The upriver shallows prevented it, of course, but not half so much as the wall of darkness that bisected her river almost directly in half. It was there, where the perpetual crust of ice marked a line in her domain, that she always paused.

She could swim through. She told herself that. Even if the Lich had created some awful new trap, she could probably fight her way free.

She didn’t try to, though. Some fears could not be escaped from so easily, and though she no longer had a real body, she could still feel those terrible shackles around her wrists and ankles.

Instead of risking it, she rose from the water as a mist and dispersed along the band of grasses that ringed the edge of the shadows that were still part of her domain. When she’d first escaped and had a chance to study this thing, she feared it would continue to expand until her domain was cut in half.

That never happened. Instead, it had merely sat there unmoving, issuing foul monsters nearly every night. So, while she could traverse her whole domain in less than an hour, this one spot took nearly half that time, and she was always on guard that some new terrible thing might exist to ambush her if she traveled during the night.

Tonight at least she was lucky, and nothing stirred, letting her travel ever more north. Eventually, she left her river and her dragon form behind as she swam up the streams, fanning out into her headwaters. Her at least she could feel clean again.

Oroza looked for the hand of man throughout the whole of her trip as she always did, but they were rarer now than they had ever been before. They were practically an endangered species.

It was only when she reached the glaciers frozen solidly into mountain passes that she finally paused to think clearly. Here, she could do little to save the world or help anyone, but she doubted very much that anyone could hurt her either. She could probably crawl up into this giant block of ice and slumber away an age, hoping that when she woke, someone else would have solved this problem.

She didn’t do that, though. She couldn’t.

Her life, precious to her as it was mattered little in all of this. What did, was that she found something to do to turn the tide in all of this. Oroza no longer knew whether she would live a year or a decade. Until now, she’d been functionally immortal, but death didn’t scare her. Only the idea that she might waste that time without striking a blow against the darkness was enough to give her real fear.