Threads of Amarion Read online

  “Randorus!” Mother shouted.

  Medophae gasped for breath, his chest heaving. He put his hands on his knees.

  “Randorus!” Mother ran to the mouth of the tall cave, then vanished into the darkness.

  “Wait,” he gasped, forcing his wobbling legs to work again. He limped across the meadow and followed her. Inside the cave was like a house. It had a flagstone floor, a bed, a wardrobe, a waterbox, and polished walls. He’d never seen a cave like this before.

  “Rand?” Mother called softly.

  “Who is Randorus?” he gasped.

  Mother bit her lip, turning around. The cave-house was obviously empty, and there was a thin layer of dust on everything. The only possessions were two old blankets on the bed at the back, folded neatly. Medophae opened a wooden wardrobe that leaned against the miraculously straight and polished wall of the cave. The wardrobe was empty.

  “Dammit!” Mother shouted, and it spooked him.

  “Mother, who is supposed to be here?”

  She looked down at him, an angry frown on her face. “A friend,” she said. “I had hoped that...” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. She’s not here. She told me she was going back to the mainland, but I had hoped...” Jarissa smacked her palm against the smooth stone wall and shouted her frustration.

  “Mother!”

  “It was stupid of me,” she said to herself. “She can’t save us.”

  He wasn’t sure what scared him more, thinking about that monster that had fallen on to Oedan, or his mother shouting at nothing. He spoke the first thing that came to his mind. “The mainland? What do you mean the mainland?”

  “Amarion.”

  “What’s Amarion?”

  “The land beyond the True Ocean. A different place with its own kingdoms.”

  It was like she was speaking gibberish. Everybody knew there was nothing beyond the True Ocean. Dandere was the only place humans lived. Saraphazia saw to that. The goddess of the ocean killed any sailors who sailed too far onto the water. Dandenes were permitted to sail the perimeter of the island, never into open ocean.

  “Who is Randorus?” he asked.

  “We need to get back to Oedan,” Mother said suddenly. “This was a mistake. She can’t help us.” She turned and ran out of the cave.

  “Mother!” he shouted, limping after her on his tired legs.

  She didn’t answer, so he shut his mouth and worked to keep up with her again. The cramps in his legs began to ease as he moved. Mother did not slow her pace, but Medophae somehow managed to stay with her. He jumped over fallen logs, scrambled down slopes, pounded his feet against the soft loam of the forest floor. He made his sole purpose to keep her retreating back in view, always in view.

  He was so exhausted and so focused on running that he didn’t even realize when they reached the city. Mother had to catch him and pull him back. She whispered softly in his ear. “Stop running. We’re here, Medin...” Her voice was sick. “The gods help us, we’re here.”

  Medophae blinked, looking at the smoking ruins of his city. Buildings were cracked like they had been hit by some giant mallet. Some were collapsed, some burned, and there were bodies everywhere.

  He panted, horrorstruck.

  “Quiet now, my Medin,” she whispered, drawing him back into the cover of the trees. “We are in great danger. Whatever attacked did so with purpose. That purpose might include us.”

  “Father...” he gasped. “Daen and Laeyena—”

  “I know,” she whispered, her voice trembling with emotion. “We must be strong, my Medin. Fear and grief will breed mistakes if we let them. We must keep our wits about us and push emotion away for now. Just for now. There will be a time to give way to our hurt, but not now.”

  “But Father—”

  She got down on her knees which, because he was such a tall boy, actually brought her lower than eye-level with him. “Listen to me, Medin. We must be heroes now, you and I. We must find our strength, and it must be greater than the villain who did this. We must be hard.”

  He wanted to cry.

  “Can you be that? Can you become granite for me?”

  “Mother...” he began. He wanted to ask her what she thought had happened to their family, but her intense gaze caught him, and he realized she didn’t know. She was asking him for strength, maybe not just for himself, but also for her, to help her be strong, too.

  “I can be granite,” he said in a quavering voice, and he clenched his teeth to stop them from chattering.

  She smiled grimly. “That’s my Medin. We are heroes now, you and I. We will face whatever dangers there are, and we will overcome them.”

  “Yes, Mother.” His voice was steady this time.

  She paused one more moment, still holding him with that gaze as though she would look into his soul and see if he was lying. He raised his chin, giving her his bravest face.

  “That’s my Medin,” she whispered. “Now, this is the plan....”

  They waited until nightfall, then went straight to a shop that sold winter cloaks. Its roof had been broken, and one whole wall cracked off and demolished, but all of the cloaks were still inside. They took two of them.

  In cloaks with deep cowls, they snuck into the ruined palace. As he had feared, they found the bodies of his brother, Daen, and his sister, Laeyena, horribly lacerated and left where they had fallen. They did not find Father.

  A part of Medophae wanted to fall to his knees and cry, but he remembered what Mother had said. He thought of himself as granite. He looked at the horror with flat eyes. When Mother asked him to lift Laeyena and carry her away from the palace into the woods, he did. Mother carried Daen.

  Together, they took the bodies away from Oedan, and they buried them in the forest a stone’s throw from the ocean. Only when they were finished with the graves did Mother finally lead him away. His arms and legs were numb. His back ached, but he went with her step by step. After they were far away from the graves, Mother laid her cloak down, then took his off and made a pillow of it.

  Again, she got on her knees and looked him in the eyes. “You did amazing,” she said. A tear welled in her eye and streaked down her dirt-smeared face. “I could not have imagined such strength within you until you showed me.”

  Her tear broke him, and he began to cry. “Daen...” he sobbed. “Laeyena...” She hugged him, and they cried together. Finally, she laid him down on the cloak and snuggled up behind him, arms around him. She held tight to him until he fell asleep.

  22

  Medophae

  The smell of the ocean spray, the leaves of the forest rustling in the autumn breeze, and the shadows of the huskpincers—it all brought back that pivotal moment in his life. That was when Medophae had stopped being a child. At eight years old, he had transformed from a child into an adult.

  He let the memory flow through him, and he let it go.

  He had to do that again, now. He had to transform from who he had become, this lost and damaged demigod, into a hero. His mother’s words echoed in his mind.

  We must be heroes now, you and I. We must find our strength, and it must be greater than the villain who did this.

  He couldn’t save his father, his brother, or his sister. He hadn’t been able to save his mother, either, years later. But there was still a chance he could save humankind from Avakketh. And the truth was, he might be the only one who could.

  He broke into a jog, following that same course his mother had taken to the cave, straight through the wild forest. The journey seemed to take much less time now than when he was eight, and he stopped in the clearing. The forest had crowded almost up to the face of the cliff. Vines had grown over the cave’s entrance, but he could still see the darkness beyond.

  Mother had come here looking for Randorus. Medophae had not known at the time, but that was only part of the name of her friend. Randorus Ak-nin Ackli Forckandor was her full name, and Medophae would later nickname her Bands.

  Bands had known Medopha
e’s mother long before he’d been born. Jarissa and Bands had adventured for a decade before they had dared to cross the True Ocean looking for whatever they might find.

  They had found Dandere, and Mother had found Jarod Madis Roloiron. And so Mother’s adventures with Bands ended and her adventures as a wife and mother began. Bands had stayed on the island for another decade before going back to Amarion. As it turned out, she had left one year before the maggot monster ripped Medophae’s life apart.

  Much later in life, Medophae had put it all together. After the battle where Dervon destroyed Oedandus, the evil god took steps to exterminate his rival’s mortal progeny. He knew that the royal line of Dandere had Oedandus’s blood in their veins, and he had sent that monstrous maggot ball expressly to murder Medophae’s family.

  Medophae turned away from the overgrown glade and covered cave. He circled the slope until he found the old path that went to the top. The Path of Oedandus was not for just anyone to use. It was sacred, and it was said horrors beyond imagining would befall any who used it without the permission of the holy men of Oedandus. But Medophae knew what was up there. There were no horrors. At least, not anymore.

  After the maggot monster destroyed Oedan and what it thought was all of the royal line, it took up residence as the new god of the Dandenes. It installed a new king, and it lived atop the volcano.

  Medophae had spent the next ten years in the forest with his mother, hiding, staying cautious about the civilized areas of Dandere. After a year of hunting and gathering, he and Mother visited the markets of a local village to trade for supplies. They always went cloaked, never to the same market twice in a month, and they never made friends. But even with all that, their luck ran out after a decade.

  When Medophae was eighteen, a tax collector of the new king, a man who had been a minor official in the palace of King Jarod, saw Mother at the market. He got a good look at her face, and he recognized her. That was the beginning of the end.

  The new king, King Haerolk, captured Mother and took her to the new capital city of Dervos. They killed her there in front of King Haerolk’s court before Medophae had even known she was gone. He had been in the forest hunting. It was a routine he and Mother had done many times. She went to shop; he went to hunt. Medophae hadn’t even thought to worry. He’d finished his hunting, returned home and sat there, waiting for his mother. He’d been waiting just like that, oblivious, while they tortured and killed her in front of everyone.

  He had never forgiven himself for that mistake, and it changed his life forever. For the first time, he didn’t care if he died, and that recklessness led him to the improbable assassination of King Haerolk. After, it led him to face off with Dandere’s false god—the maggot monster. And finally, that recklessness led him to his lost god.

  And it started here, on the Path of Oedandus.

  He drew a breath and began hiking up the volcano.

  It took half the day of hard hiking, wending through trees until he broke above the tree line. The warm fall temperature dropped steadily as he ascended. By the time he began to struggle with the thin air, he could feel the chill of winter nearby. The brief autumn of Dandere was about to turn. The ice storms would come quickly after that.

  Medophae stopped, breathing hard. He unslung a waterskin and drank sparingly, looking over the western side of the island. A half dozen large cities dotted the coast, breaking through the forest. Things had changed. Oedan had been the only city of that size when he had lived here.

  Medophae now wished he had thought to bring a cloak. His exertions had kept the cold air at bay, but now that he had stopped, the chill set in. The skies overhead were deep blue, with a white cloud here and there, but winter could strike tonight, for all he knew.

  Slinging the waterskin over his neck, he began the last part of the climb. In less than an hour, he crested the ridge, jutting up like spikes on a crown that ringed the summit. The top of the volcano was a flat rock floor with deep cracks in it. Between those ominous fissures, orange fire glowed. The volcano hadn’t erupted the entire time Medophae had been here, but it always seemed ready to.

  His heart beat faster, despite himself. He had fought the monster here, right here, and, unlike the rest of the island, this place looked exactly the same.

  Bands had followed him the whole way. At the time, she had been disguised as a tall, blond-haired girl from a nearby village, and he had no idea she was really Randorus Ak-nin Ackli Forckandor, the dragon who had flown his mother across the ocean from a mythical land called Amarion. He had told her to go back to her village. He told her he was going to die, and if she was with him, she would die, too. But she had stubbornly refused to listen to him.

  Medophae took a deep breath and stepped down onto that flat, cracked floor of the volcano’s top.

  Back then, the maggot monster had dropped onto him from its greasy cloud just like it had dropped onto the city of Oedan. Medophae had wielded an ordinary longsword, backed by plenty of training from his mother...and he’d stood absolutely no chance of stopping that supernatural horror.

  A dragon, however, was more than a match for it.

  When Bands at last transformed into a giant green-scaled dragon, Medophae didn’t know who was more surprised, him or the maggot monster.

  The fight had been short and brutal. The maggot monster had about as much chance against Bands as Medophae had had against it. It took two swipes at her with its mucous tentacles, missed, and then she blew a hole in it with dragon fire. It fell down the mountain, a burning wreck, and Bands resumed her village girl form. Slack-jawed, Medophae had stared at her as she tried to calm him and explain.

  Medophae crossed the hot, flat rock to the far side of the platform. The short, rock pedestal still held the pearlescent horn. It was shaped like a long trumpet, thin at the mouth and flaring at the end. It swirled, as if it had once been a shell that had been twisted into a horn. There were no pictures carved onto the surface, no filigree or any other decoration that Medophae had seen on numerous other arcane artifacts made by threadweavers. But then, this wasn’t a horn made by a mortal. It was a horn made by a force of nature, a god. It wasn’t for ceremony or for intimidation, but for a specific purpose.

  “The artifacts of the gods are best left for the gods,” Bands had said to him so long ago. In the aftermath of the maggot monster’s death, he had gone to pick up the horn, thinking correctly that it was some enchanted weapon. Bands had told to leave it alone.

  “What does that mean?” he had asked.

  “That this was created by Oedandus himself.”

  He had listened to her and left the horn alone.

  But that was then. He picked up the horn, and could feel the potency of it in his hand, a thrumming vibration, a deep warmth. This horn had been made to thwart a goddess.

  He took his prize and climbed back up the ridge. Far away to the east, the horizon was a thin line of black. A storm. It could be here soon if a fierce wind pushed it. He had a matter of hours to reach the shore and call the whales.

  Shrugging the waterskins higher onto his shoulders, he tucked the horn under his arm and began the descent.

  23

  Medophae

  Medophae had been beaten, sliced, poisoned and disfigured. He was exhausted, but he pushed himself down the slope as fast as he could. The storm on the horizon was moving fast—the storm that would begin winter on Dandere—and he needed to be off the island before that happened.

  So he hiked strong, running when he could. He thought about what he must do once he reached the shore. The story Bands told him was that the horn controlled whales, and he thought about how to best use that power. He skipped down some loose scree to solid dirt again and thought about his options.

  Saraphazia always appeared as a whale. Would the horn control her? He had to assume it would not. The real question was whether it would summon her along with her whales. If it summoned Saraphazia, Medophae wouldn’t make it any farther than he had in the boat.

&n
bsp; But even if Saraphazia wasn’t summoned by the horn, she would sooner or later discover he was controlling her whales. He had to plan for that.

  He dodged around a boulder and continued running down the slope. The trip up the mountain had taken hours. The trip down took only half that time, and Medophae soon descended out of the cooler air into the warm forest of the island. He turned south, heading straight for the coast, and eventually came again to that isolated little cove where he had once hunted for huskpincers.

  He took a deep breath. To his left, the storm had grown, climbing up the horizon with iron-gray billows. That monster of a storm was an hour away, maybe less.

  “Okay...” he murmured. He lifted the horn in his hand, braced the middle of the horn on his right forearm, and blew.

  A high-pitched keen filled the air and seemed to shake the rock underneath him. Golden fire crackled around the horn, wrapping around both his arms. It filled him, and he gasped. It felt just like Oedandus!

  The god had put a piece of himself into the horn, and it was so familiar that Medophae felt suddenly invincible. He blew the horn again, long and loud, and the horn wreathed him in golden flame. It also drew the breath out of him, pulling as though the horn expected him to blast on the thing forever.

  He yanked it away from his lips, and only then did it stop sucking the air from his lungs. He gasped, coughing, and he wobbled on his feet.

  The horn had also pulled life from him. Perhaps it would have done the same to Oedandus, seeking fuel for its purpose from the never-ending GodSpill of an actual god.

  Medophae blew on the horn a third time for as long as he could. The golden energy crackled around him, drew the air from him again, and yanked at his very soul. He crashed to his knees, barely keeping himself from tumbling into the water. The horn clattered to the rock, sliding right up to the edge