Vainglory 3.29 - Pallishae

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-Plum

29 – Pallishae

Ward stepped carefully through the enormous courtyard, worried that some of the vines might be more “alive” than typical ones. They didn’t look like the ones that had given him and the others trouble earlier, but who could say what sorts of strange flora and fauna the garden would throw at him? As he progressed toward the tree, he noted the flagstones differed from elsewhere in the garden. They looked almost like smooth rust-colored porcelain tiles, but the gaps where you’d expect some kind of grout were deep, dark grooves.

“These statues are ancient,” Grace observed, standing near one of the alien-looking beings on its pedestal. “You can see they used to have more detail, but the weather—” She paused and looked up at the sky. “Do you think it rains here?”

Ward shrugged. “I don’t know if we’re on a planet or in some kind of magical pocket realm or what. I mean the sun’s taking forever to go down.” Back when the giant bird had dropped him in the lake, he’d thought it was late afternoon, but the sun had only moved a tiny fraction of the way toward the horizon since then.

“Some planets rotate slowly or not at all.” Grace frowned. “I think.”

“Nah, you’re right. I remember reading some article about Venus once; it has a day that’s something like two hundred times longer than Earth’s.” Ward had come close to the tree’s enormous trunk, much broader, if not taller, than the redwoods he’d seen on a coastal drive through California one summer. He stood there, sword in hand, scanning the trunk, looking for the knothole he’d seen in his vision.

“See anything?” Grace asked, coming to stand beside him.

Ward shrugged. “I mean, I see a ton of places that an amulet could be stashed.” It was true— the ancient trunk was incredibly gnarled, with sap-oozing gaps all over the rough, white bark. He could see half a dozen knotholes on the expanse before him, but none looked quite right. Slowly, he began to move around the tree, pausing every few steps to study the vast surface of its trunk.

“Do you smell that?” Grace asked.

“You’ll need to be more specific.”

“Like a sweet—”

Ward nodded. “It’s the sap.” He’d picked up the overbearing odor standing on the other side of the gate. “It’s not just sweet, though. There’s an undertone of decay.”

“Is that what that is? Isn’t it strange that I can access your human senses, but the lycan part eludes me? I wonder if it's like before, when the wolf didn’t want to let me in. Are you resisting me?” When Ward scowled at her, she hastily added, “I mean subconsciously.”

“Maybe your mind isn’t wired for wolf senses.”

“Huh.” Grace stroked her chin, contemplating. “Maybe that’s it.”

Ward continued around the tree, and he had just spotted a hole in the bark that looked something like the one in his dream, when he heard the clatter of iron scraping on stone. He lifted his sword, whirling toward the sound, only to see Lali shoving a rusted gate open on the far end of the courtyard.

“It’s Haley!” Grace said excitedly, but before Ward could respond, she disappeared, no doubt afraid Trent was close behind the two women.

Ward turned back to the distant gate and watched as Lali and Haley gingerly stepped into the courtyard. He lifted an arm to wave as Trent came through behind them. “Hey!” he yelled.

Haley lifted her hand to her eyes, squinting toward his voice, but it didn’t seem like she could see him. “Ward?” she shouted, and, oddly, her voice seemed to be muted, like there was something between them.

Ward frowned, “Haley!” he shouted, and this time, both Haley and Lali squinted toward the tree.

“Ward?” Haley yelled again, jogging toward the tree.

“Wait!” Trent shouted, and Haley slid to a halt. “There could be traps—that voice could be a trap.”

As Haley looked around, scowling, Ward started walking toward them. “What the hell is going on?” he growled. “Why can’t they see me?”

“Ward!” Haley yelled again, now only twenty strides from him.

“Haley!” He shouted, but this time she didn’t seem to hear him. Ward ran toward her, but, to his dismay, the trio faded like a mirage as he approached, utterly gone. “Grace, what the fuck?”

“I… Ward, I don’t like this.”

Ward whirled on her and felt a surge of rising panic when he saw his sardonic, smartass, know-it-all demon passenger looked like a frightened child. Grumbling, he strode past her, back toward the tree. When he was close, he turned, and, to his relief and puzzlement, found he could see Haley and the others again, about halfway toward the tree. “The hell is this?” He raised his voice and yelled, “Haley!”

Haley looked up, squinting toward the tree. “I heard it again,” she said.

“Aye, I heard an echo. Is he trapped in the tree?” Lali replied.

“It’ll have to wait!” Trent cried, pointing. “Look!”

Ward looked where he was pointing and saw nothing—just more leaves and overgrown statues. Apparently, Haley saw it, though, as she shouted, “Back to back!”

“What is it?” He yelled, scanning, his heart pounding with frustrated worry. He gripped his sword and charged toward them again, only to have them fade from view as he approached. “Goddammit!”

“Ward,” Grace said, her voice small, “in your vision, did you say the leaves were more red than green?”

“They were totally red…” Immediately, he saw the reason for her question. The leaves all over the courtyard, as far as he could see, were green with red streaks or, if they were dried up, they were brown. However, near Haley, Trent, and Lali, the leaves on the ground were bright red. “What the hell?”

“I think…” Grace trailed off, shaking her head. Meanwhile, Haley and the others began to grunt and yell, swinging their fists and weapons. Strangely, Ward couldn’t see what they were fighting, but he saw Lali’s head snap back and her nose gush blood as she cursed and spat, stomping out with one of her big boots.

“What, Grace? What do you think?”

“I think we’re separated by time.”

“What?” Ward spun, furiously, as though looking at his environment would give him more clues. “Why?”

“I don’t know!” Grace was near tears as they both watched Haley and the others fighting furiously. The more he stared, the more he realized he and they were separated by something, whether it be time or some magical barrier he didn’t understand. The light was different around them, and, just as their words were muted and hollow, he thought he could almost see through them at times—like they weren’t wholly solid.

With no other objective he could imagine, he spun to the tree and charged forward, aiming for the knothole where he thought the amulet might be. It was a good twenty feet off the ground, so he’d have to climb. As he ran, he shoved his sword into its scabbard and leaped, reaching for a rough patch of bark, hoping it was sturdy enough to cling to. The bark was hard and dry, but it held as he locked an iron grip on it, pulling desperately, stretching up his other hand, looking for the next grip.

All the while he climbed, his mind raced. The situation was so bizarre. He almost felt like he was in a weird TV episode where the character discovers they’re a ghost. That couldn’t be it, though, right? He hadn’t died… He shook his head, irritated that he’d begun to entertain the thought. He’d know it if he’d died! No, maybe Grace had the right idea. Maybe the tree or the artifact had changed time somehow. It sounded impossible, but how many impossible things had he seen since coming to the Vainglory System?

“Hurry, Ward!” Grace cried, and he knew why—every minute he spent trying to figure out this mess was another minute Haley was fighting without him.

“I’m trying, dammit!” he growled, willing the wolf to come out, willing those iron-hard nails to spring forth, willing his shoulders and arms to swell with the unnatural strength of the beast. Once again, when he wanted it most, the damn thing didn’t listen, though, and he almost fell as his all-too-human nails failed to bite into a narrow crevice in the bark. “Come on, you sonofabitch! Come on!”

###

“Lali!” Haley screamed, watching as the big woman was dragged, stumbling, to the ground by one of the hunched, clay-like humanoids.

“I’ve got her,” Trent shouted, and then his voice rose and those damned, painful words of power echoed maddeningly over the courtyard. Haley couldn’t watch the effect; she had her own assailants to deal with.

Faced with three attackers, she fell into her rhythms, kicking, weaving, punching, slipping, turning, parrying—all in a dizzying pattern, faster than most people would be able to track. It reminded her of her test to ascend to red adept. Her old master had put her up against another red adept and two blues besides. Of course, they’d been instructed to fight at “practice speed,” but it had still been intense. Since then, she and Ward had been in situations that made that practice fight feel tame, and this was no exception.

She slipped a heavy, overhead blow from one of the golems—that was how she saw those gray and mud-colored, featureless beings—and, gliding around it, brought her fist, heavy with fire energy, around in a spinning hammer blow, smashing one of its comrades in the back of the dense, pliable skull. Despite the power of the strike, she didn’t think she would have hurt it if not for the fire in her fist. She released that potent heat, though, and watched as it radiated through the clay-like material of the thing’s head—a spider’s web of glowing orange veins.

To her great pride, the monster toppled, falling into the bright red leaves, inert. Now, facing only two enemies, she spared a fraction of a second to glance toward Lali and Trent, assessing the situation. She saw another downed golem, but only one, and there were at least seven still harassing her companions. Worse, Lali had lost her mace—it stood proudly from one creature’s head, stuck where the big warrior had buried it. “Lali!” Haley screamed, “Get the sword!” She meant the one she’d been carrying and had dropped when the monsters attacked.

Her fire had worn down, so she had to fight for a while, moving through her rhythms to build it up again. Each perfect block, each practiced strike, gave her more and more momentum, more gravity to draw the magic out of the air, pulling it into her fists, flesh, bones, and blood. “Just hang on!” she grunted, watching her two companions being battered by the monsters.

###

“You’re almost there, Ward. Come on! Don’t give up,” Grace whispered into his ear. He didn’t know if she was climbing the tree beside him or weightlessly clinging to his back. It didn’t matter, and he didn’t care. All he could focus on were his burning forearms and shoulders. He tried to take some weight off his fingers by driving his boots against the tree, but he was rarely able to get a purchase with his feet. Sweat poured down his brow, stinging his eyes.

He turned his face upward, and growled, “I should have prepared that damn feather spell again.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Ward. Do you really think you could have concentrated while Haley and the others were fighting?”

Ward didn’t respond. He focused on the next handgrip and, with a burst of strength, swung himself up toward it. For once, his fingers found an easy purchase, curling around the gnarled hump in the trunk—perhaps once a broken branch. He hung like that for several seconds, and Grace encouraged him, “I think you can get to the knothole on the next swing, Ward. Look up again!”

With bleary, stinging eyes, Ward turned his gaze upward and, sure enough, if he swung hard enough, he might be able to get his fingers inside the lower edge of the hole. He hoped it was the right one. “Here goes,” he grunted, and pulled, swinging his weight and stretching his right hand up toward his target. His fingers fell just short, and he cursed as he slid back down.

His left arm had gone past burning into numbness, and he feared he’d lose his grip any second. Desperately, he scanned above him for another grip and focused on a small, sap-covered fissure in the bark. It was angled wrong—he could probably get a grip on it, but he’d lose it as soon as his full weight came to bear. Hanging from one arm, feeling his grip get weaker and weaker, he knew he had to do something.

Groaning with the strain, he reached his right hand toward his belt and grasped the drawstring around his pouch, tugging it to create a tiny gap. Gritting his teeth, he poked a finger in there and, as he became aware of the magical space within the pouch, he hurriedly grabbed onto one of the rusty knives in the stack of weapons he’d gotten from the skeleton. It wasn’t that he didn’t have his own knife, but it was strapped to his backpack…elsewhere with Haley.

Thanks to the magic of the pouch, when he pulled his finger out of the opening, he found the knife firmly clutched in his grasp. With what he knew was the last of the strength in his left arm and hand, he heaved himself up and jammed the knife into the tree, just a foot beneath the knothole. The blade bit surprisingly deeply, and he breathed a sigh of relief as he hung there, shaking out his exhausted left arm.

“Good thinking, Ward!” Grace said, once again, somehow right beside him.

“Let’s see if this is the right place,” he grunted, pulling hard on the dagger and reaching up to grasp the bottom lip of the knothole. He pulled himself up, putting his eyes over the edge and peering inside. There, sitting in a pool of congealed, blood-red sap, was the golden amulet—the talisman that looked identical to the one that had been sealed in the lead box he and True had delivered to the Assembly. With the last of his strength, he heaved himself a little higher and darted his hand into the hole, jamming his fist into the pool of sap and clenching his fingers around the talisman.

A jolt of something like electricity went through him, and he released the dagger and fell. He might have yelled or cursed, but whatever had jolted him made his vision go dark, and he didn’t even know he’d fallen. In fact, to him, it felt like he was sitting down, and then the darkness was banished as a candle flared to life before him, illuminating a strange individual sitting cross-legged, facing him.

Ward recognized the features of one of the “alien-looking” statues from the courtyard. This was no statue, however. The man facing him was tall and thin, with long, wispy white hair. His eyes were angular and larger than a human’s, though they were beautiful, too—irises ringed in magenta, purple, and blue. His skin was coppery, and his teeth were white and straight when he smiled. He seemed ageless, to Ward, despite the white hair; not a single wrinkle marred his flesh.

He lifted one of his too-long arms and stretched it toward Ward, gently tapping one of his long, thin digits against his forehead. “Ward.”

Ward watched him lower his arm, folding it on his lap, amid the layers of his strange, metallic robes. “That’s right.”

“I am Pallishae, and I thank you for heeding my call.”

“Pallishae? What call?”

“The visions. You bear the blood of the Harrowguard, do you not? I’ve hoped for one such as you, one with a touch of the old guard in their blood. Your kin are few, however, and fewer still on this world where the corrupted drive them away.”

“Harrowguard?” Ward wouldn’t have guessed what he meant if not for the clue about the “corrupted” driving them away. “Do you mean dreadmarked?”

“A label made in ignorance. No doubt you learned it from one of the crude devices crafted by the artificers of your time?” He waved away Ward’s response, speaking rapidly, “We haven’t time for this. I must explain myself. Ward, did you know that we’ve met?”

“We have?”

“On the world you call Cinder. You met my corrupted self some thousand years in the future.”

“What the shit?”

“Still your mind. Master your emotions. In this place, in the blood of the Yarrim Tree, an echo of my spirit dwells. When you came to it, I used the tree's magic to pull you through to a time when I was still here, dwelling in the amulet you now clutch.”

“When—when did we meet?”

“In your time! For a thousand years, the corrupted have had control of my vessel. For a thousand years, they’ve fed it the blood of vile men and women. I became twisted—evil—and they will use me to commit horrible atrocities—to unleash calamity! I was cleverer than they thought, however. A piece of me has always been in this tree, and now I’ve pulled you through time. You can take the amulet! You can take it, and then I’ll push you back through time! With the amulet—my vessel—in hand, you must confront the corrupted.”

Ward pictured Haley’s cousin, Sonder Yates, in the cultists’ hall, his blood drained, used to feed the amulet. He was a rotten soul, so it tracked with what Pallishae was telling him. “Wait, what the hell? Let me get this straight: A thousand years ago, some cultists took your amulet from this tree. They, um, fed you evil blood, and now they're going to unleash a calamity on the world?”

“On all the worlds!”

“Okay, but somehow you brought me back through time so I can take the amulet instead?”

“Precisely, but time is a strange thing, Ward. When you take my vessel, I will be in it, and I will aid you, but there will still be an echo of me in the amulet the corrupted took. We must stop them.”

“But if I have the amulet, how can they have—”

“As I said—an echo.” The man, Pallishae, clicked his tongue, apparently frustrated. “One does not alter the flow of time so easily. I existed for too long in the timeline in the hands of the corrupted; the echo is strong and quite divergent from the original. The being they made me into is not the same as me—not any longer.”

“What am I supposed—”

“Our time is short, Ward. Listen! Soon, you will open your eyes and find yourself in the proper time. Get yourself to safety and meditate on my vessel. I will endeavor to speak with you again.”

A sudden thought occurred to him, and he asked, “Are you one of the old ones? The ancients?”

The man smiled and shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I suppose it would make sense that your people would label us as such. I’m sorry, Ward, but our time is done—your journey through time concludes.”

Ward opened his mouth to respond, but suddenly he was hit with a wave of vertigo, and the world went dark again. When he opened his eyes, his head throbbed, his back ached, and he was looking up at the branches of the great tree, clad entirely in ruby-red leaves. He heard noise—grunts, curses, cracks, clangs—and suddenly he remembered Haley and the others. Despite the sharp pain in his skull, he leaped to his feet and ripped his sword from the scabbard, but not before noticing the golden amulet clutched in his left hand. Frowning, he stuffed it into his pocket and charged into the fray.