Chapter 40: Alliances

Life had certainly taken an interesting turn lately.

Relaila, Themur, and Dina were riding through the early night. The sun had already set, but it was never far from the summer sky, and although the first stars had begun to glimmer above, it was still bright enough that they had no trouble navigating.

Dina glanced to her right. If she hadn’t known the old man riding the black horse was Themur, she never would have guessed. Other than his imposing figure, nothing about him even remotely resembled the Knight Eternal she had known over the past weeks. Not even his voice was the same, now that she could hear it without the muffling of his thick helmet. And for the first time, she could see his eyes—green, soft, and kind.

Instead of his black armor, Themur now wore a simple gray hooded cloak he had bought from a trader in Oakfield. The old armor, along with his shield and sword, hung from the saddlebags, clinking softly with every step his horse took.

It wasn’t just a physical change. His whole demeanor was different now. Gone was the silent, stoic figure, replaced with someone she could talk to, and more than that, laugh with.

She no longer recognized him. And she did not mind that in the slightest.

“Are you certain?” she asked him.

They had escorted the peasant family back to the nearest village they had passed, taking turns lifting the broken wheel of the cart so it could be pushed along the road. Once Dina had paid him, the carpenter in Oakfield had promised to repair the damaged vehicle, and after a quick stroll through the local market, the three of them had returned to the road.

That’s when Themur had told them he felt they would be needed elsewhere that night.

“No, I’m not,” he replied to Dina’s question, chuckling a little. “I’m new to this. But I believe the Word has spoken to me.”

Relaila was curious. “How do you know?”

“I don’t. It might just be my own idea. It’s not at all like when the so-called gods of the world commanded us. But it doesn’t really matter if I’m wrong about this, right? There’s no harm if we get to Grainsel only to find out I was just imagining things.”

“And if you’re not? If you’re right..?” Dina queried, still not quite understanding how this new god of Themur’s worked.

“If I’m right, there’s no telling what’s going to happen,” he replied. “But I trust the Word.”

Say what you wanted about the gods of the world, but if she had to pick one thing that was good about them, it was that they never left you any reason to doubt. When they gave you a message, you knew, with absolute certainty, that they had indeed spoken to you.

She broke off her train of thought and mulled that over.

No, that wasn’t exactly fair to the Word. Given the nature of the so-called gods and the kind of things they usually ordered their followers to do, maybe a little doubt wasn’t such a bad thing after all. The Word’s silent voice did appear to leave room for your own conscience. She certainly wasn’t used to that with Patera.

Relaila seemed somewhat dissatisfied with his answer. “Not to be insensitive or anything, Themur, but I still think we should talk about it.”

He didn’t seem to mind her question. “You mean what we’ll do if things go badly there?”

“Yeah. We’re different now,” she said. “We used to be the best of the best, hand-picked by the Emperor himself for our skills. Supported by the gods, there was nothing we couldn’t do.

“Now, we’re nothing more than a former Fire Breather, a novice Flow Walker, and an old man. No offense.”

Themur laughed, the sound bubbling pleasantly like a brook from his throat.

“That I am, ain’t I? I will have to get used to that. Though I still don’t believe it was the Emperor who brought us together. Not really.”

“So what can we do if it comes to a fight?” Relaila asked. “You said you would never lift your sword again.”

Themur thought for a while. “I think I said I wouldn’t lift it for Mardocar again. But you’re right. If I can avoid it, I don’t want to hurt anyone. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still lift my shield.”

“How much can you do without him holding it for you?” Dina asked. He was very old, after all.

“Probably less than I’d like,” Themur admitted. “You’re right. We shouldn’t count on my fighting prowess anymore. What about you two?”

Dina felt like she didn’t have much to contribute. “All I can do is heal, and only if I concentrate. It’s slow work, using the Deepwell. I can patch you up if things go wrong, but I can’t fight.”

“Fair enough. Relaila?”

“I haven’t used real fire magic for a decade. It’s difficult. I still remember how to do it, I think, but chances are it’s going to fail as often as it succeeds.”

“Great!” Themur shouted, his voice filled with laughter and his cloak fluttering in the wind as he spurred his horse on. “Anyone up for yet another last stand, on me!”

* * *

When they finally approached Grainsel, the little village seemed much like any other they had passed through before. It was darker now, and in the light of flickering wall torches and lanterns, they could just barely make out the silhouettes of a dozen or so buildings, most of them quite small. Clearly, this was not a prosperous place.

As they rode down the street toward the small central square, Dina felt uneasy. It wasn’t that the streets were empty. This late at night, that was not surprising, considering most of the people living here were farmers who would have to get up early the following morning to tend to their fields and their cattle. But something about the light shining from the building windows at the far end of the village didn’t seem quite right. It was too bright, its flickering too intense. The shadows seemed to dance across the ground as if they were alive, too unpredictable to have been cast by mere torches.

She wasn’t the only one to notice it.

“I don’t like this,” Relaila said. “Something’s wrong.”

Rounding the corner of a long stable building, they got a clear view of the wide river and the small cabins clustered along its western bank. Their walls, made from old, unpainted wood, were rough and somewhat asymmetrical, and their roofs were thatched and dry. These were the poor quarters, Dina thought. This was where the most vulnerable lived.

And two of the houses were on fire.

The first building, the one to their right, must have only been burning for a few minutes, as the flames were barely visible through its open windows. But the other shack, the one closer to the river on their left, had likely been burning longer, and flames were now starting to escape and lick along the outer walls.

But what she found most unsettling was that none of the inhabitants were rushing next door for help or sprinting toward the river for water. The eerie silence of the night was only broken by the crackling, burning wood, as if the families the buildings belonged to had already perished, even before the flames had engulfed their homes. And none of the villagers sleeping in the adjacent cabins had yet woken to discover the horror that had befallen their neighbors.

Dina leapt from her horse and rushed to the cabin, its small door already loose from its hinges. Themur followed in her wake, hurried and determined. Time was of the essence.

“I’ll take the other one!” Relaila shouted behind them, pointing to the burning building next door.

Shielding her face with her arm against the searing heat, Dina dove through the open door. On the ash-covered floor, she could see a young man—unconscious or dead—cradling a small child, who was crying in fear, too young to understand what was happening.

“Can you hear me?” she asked, shaking the man gently. “Are you hurt?”

He didn’t respond, but she could feel his pulse. He wasn’t dead. Not yet.

At first, she hadn’t recognized him, covered in soot and mud, lying face down on the scorched floor. But when she checked his head for injuries, she finally realized who he was.

Lying before her was one of the targets they had hunted for the past weeks. This was Larean Onyx, enemy of the Agerian Empire, already half-dead, his future entirely in her hands.

For the briefest of moments, a flash of old memories urged her to leave him there and let the fire claim him. She wouldn’t even need to lift a finger to end his life. It would be so easy to fulfill her mission.

But she quickly dismissed the thought. Entertaining such a notion—even just hypothetically—was an open invitation for Patera to move back into her life. And Dina held no illusions that the so-called god would stay away out of the goodness of her heart. If invited, she would come. And then the terror would begin all over again.

“Themur, help me,” she begged her friend, knowing she wasn’t strong enough on her own.

Dina lifted the child, cradling it tightly as she made soothing noises and stroked its head. Themur grabbed the unconscious Larean beneath the arms and dragged him out through the door.

Panting, the former Knight Eternal sat him down in the mud outside the burning cabin.

“I’ll take care of him. Go and help Relaila,” Dina told her friend.

She could now see a third house on fire, far enough from the first two that it was clear someone was out there helping the inferno along. By this point, the villagers had begun to wake and notice the fires, and some of them had come out into the street to help put them out, their frightened voices mingling with the roar of the flames.

Opening her alchemist’s satchel, she took out her healer’s kit and retrieved a small blue bottle. She unplugged the cap and held it beneath Larean’s nose, letting the vapors of the Water of Life jolt his olfactory system into overdrive.

His head jerked as though someone had slapped his cheek. He groaned and slowly opened one eye. Larean mumbled something that made Dina feel mildly embarrassed.

“No, I’m not your mother,” she told him, not quite sure how to respond. “But you’re safe. So’s the child.”

Holding the little bundle in her arms, Dina felt a calm wash over her, despite the circumstances. Taking advantage of the moment of stillness, she focused on the Deepwell and called down healing magic from it. Slowly, she began to knit together the torn fabric of Larean’s broken body, driving off the infection she could sense raging through his tissues and cleaning his lungs of soot.

Suddenly, he opened both his eyes, staring at her with a mix of surprise and fear.

“You!” he cried from dry lips.

She shushed him, her tone no different from what she previously had used with the child now resting peacefully in her arms.

“It’s okay, Larean. I’m a friend.”

His fearful scream for help told her he obviously didn’t believe her. She could hardly blame him. Had she still been allied with Patera, she would, of course, have lied to him, trying to lull him into a false sense of security. There was no way he could know she had truly defected from her patron god.

Unless…

“The Word sent me,” she croaked, her voice catching in her throat as she spoke the words. Maybe, just maybe, she really had been given a purpose beyond what she could imagine for herself.

Moments later, Larean seemed to calm down a little.

“You know Him?” he whispered, his voice a mix of surprise and fatigue.

“I’m beginning to, I think,” Dina admitted, to both Larean and herself. It was finally time for a reckoning. Only by embracing the Word could she break the yoke the fallen gods had placed on her soul. And now, the time for that had finally come.

For a short while, she soaked in her newfound feeling of peace, before the moment of tranquility was shattered by an agonized scream coming from the street to her left.

There, a young woman—one of the poor villagers whose homes had been set ablaze—stood, her face twisted in agony. From her belly, the tip of a curved sword protruded. Out of the darkness behind her stepped a blood-soaked man, like a wraith from the abyss, ripping the sword from her butchered body.

Cold fear gripped Dina’s spine. The shadow he had stepped out of seemed to be far deeper than the night, the origin of his power much too literal for her comfort.

Their second target had arrived.

And the look in his eyes made it clear to her that Pelam Gathór was no longer the scared little boy they had been hunting for the past few weeks.

“They’re sacrificing the village,” Larean groaned. “To Mardocar and Patera. And they want revenge on you.”

So the hunted had become the hunters.

No, that was not entirely accurate. A crucial nuance was missing. The hunted now believed they had become the hunters, while in reality, they had only been caught in the trap the so-called gods had set for them.

Like a rabbit, its foot stuck in a snare, admiring the butcher’s skill as he sharpened his knife.

Larean sat up, no longer wincing in pain. Dina had managed to break the infection, and he was no longer feverish. The wound, though, was still there and would take days to fully heal. But for the moment, there was no time to do more than that for him. At least it shouldn’t slow him down anymore.

“We need to go now,” she told him, knowing they would have to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Pelam and Soria before the two new agents of the gods discovered them.

“Not yet,” Larean said. “There are still people here. We need to get them to safety first.”

Dina looked around. Hidden here on the outskirts of the village, they had not yet been spotted by the servant of Mardocar raging through it. But the minute they entered the fray, that could change.

Still, he wasn’t wrong. And besides, Themur and Relaila were already in there, going from house to house looking for survivors.

She and Larean joined the former Blood Sister outside a two-room cabin near the market square. From the size of the flames escaping its roof, it must have been set on fire only minutes earlier, yet the dry wood and brittle thatch it was built from burned with almost explosive speed.

“He’s leaving the younger children for Soria,” Relaila told them. “And I don’t even want to imagine what Patera intends for her to do with them, once they’ve finished burning the village.”

Larean looked queasy, and Dina would bet it had nothing to do with his recent brush with smoke inhalation.

“We can use that,” he said, his voice determined, though it shook a little. “The surviving families can escape on their own. But the orphans… we have a chance to grab them before Soria gets to them.”

Dina nodded. The small child she carried in her arms stirred, as if to confirm their decision.

This was going to be a long night.

Author's Note

Thank you for reading Echoes of Fallen Gods! If you enjoyed this chapter, please consider giving it a like.

Now also available as a free audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/@LordsOfTheStars