The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) (36 page)
Uthia didn’t look as happy, however.
“The weed is pretty, but it kills trees when it is allowed to flourish like this. Someone will be along soon to harvest this crop. For now, we can do our part.” She motioned them forward. “Pluck a flower at the base, and either rub it along your skin or eat it. I would suggest eating it; you don’t want to walk around this realm shimmering like a beacon to whatever creature would have you for dinner.”
Joya plucked a flower as close to the base of the petals as she could. As the flower came away from the plant, it lost a bit of its light. She sniffed it, and was greeted by a heady, soapy smell, almost like plum blossoms. Joya placed the flower on her tongue. It was bitter, and her first reaction was to spit it out, but Uthia was nodding, so Joya chewed a few times and swallowed.
“They don’t taste very good; I think it’s because of the oil of the petals,” Uthia said. The dryad plucked a flower from the vine and twirled it in her white fingers. The oil of the flower tinted her fingers, and where it rubbed, an iridescent glow spread across the bark of her hand. As Joya watched, Uthia’s skin seemed to drink it in. Before long the glow was absorbed into her skin. “Dryads,” Uthia said, “require different sustenance than humans.”
“Like plants?” Angelica asked, jamming a handful of the flowers into her mouth. Her face screwed up at the pungent taste of the flowers, and she chewed several times before taking a painful-looking gulp.
“Yes,” Uthia said. She plucked a few more of the sunflowers and started rubbing them into the vines and leaves that cascaded from her head like hair.
Joya could feel the flower traveling to her stomach, like a pleasant warmth spreading through her. Surprisingly, it took the edge off her hunger too.
“They are great food for travelers. Here, have some more.”
As she reached for more, Joya noticed the luminescence on her fingers, where the oil of the flower had rubbed off. After five or so more flowers, Uthia told her she could stop.
“A few flowers a day should replace what you would normally get from the sun,” she told them.
“Joya, is this flower in your herb book?” Angelica asked, tentatively taking another flower from its vine. She didn’t eat this one, just looked at it.
“Do I have time to look?” Joya asked, and Uthia nodded.
She took the book out of her pack and sat down, thumbing through the frail pages until she made it to the “s” section. It wasn’t there, and Joya made a mental note to add it that night when they settled in for bed.
But as they started travel again for the day, Jovian wondered how long this near-peaceful feeling would follow them. They had three possessed women after them, as well as Porillon, and the as-yet-unseen dark forces of the Shadow Realm. For some reason the thought made him think of the Pale Horse, and the battleground of bone it rode upon.
The day passed in silence. The truth was that all of them were far too engrossed in this alien realm to speak. Occasionally they would tap each other and point off into the distance, where the sunflowers were illuminating a strange creature or beast they had never seen before. Once spotted, the beasts would normally flit or lumber away. They saw other strange things, too. Through the day they had spotted fairies like Tegaris, but the size of a gnome, with wings as large as an eagle. There had been a herd of deer that could stand on their hind legs, and who had one single horn curving up from the center of their head. There were also pixies the size of Angelica’s hand who lived in the trees, and even more things Angelica couldn’t completely explain.
There was also the darkness, always present, always pressing in on them. Angelica began thinking of the darkness more as a being rather than an atmosphere. It seemed to shift and move just out of her sight, always making her feel on edge when they left one pool of sunflower light and headed for another, as if something lurked in the darkness, waiting for the right time to pounce.
“Border wards,” Uthia said, noticing the uneasy set to Angelica’s shoulders and the skittish glances she cast at the shadows before leaving one puddle of light.
“The same we ran into before? That made us stop breathing?” Jovian asked.
“Yes, the same. You are strangers here — the border must keep watch on you, make sure whatever it felt that let you pass was true, not a farce.”
“I don’t want to know what would happen if it considered us a threat,” Angelica shivered.
“You really don’t,” Uthia agreed.
Out of the corner of her eye Angelica saw Joya grimace and itch her palms furiously.
That night — or maybe it was day, Angelica couldn’t really tell — they made camp at the base of a large tree, sheltered in the light of the sunflowers. Uthia gathered flowers for their dinner while Jovian hunted for something to eat to supplement them. Uthia cautioned against taking life or spilling blood in the forest. Jovian couldn’t tell if it was Uthia’s aversion to his hunting her charges, or if there was something about the Haunted Forest that would react badly to his killing.
“You know, I’ve been thinking about something for a while,” Angelica said once they had settled down around the fire. Joya was taking notes in the back of her herb book about the sunflower, even trying, poorly, to draw an image of it.
“Wait a minute — you think?” Jovian asked.
“Very funny. But seriously, if we are anakim, we can’t be the only ones, can we?”
“I never really thought about that,” Joya said, frowning at her pitiful sketch.
“Well, there are the four of us, and then there are the nephilim, and the rephaim, right?”
“I’m sure we aren’t the only anakim,” Jovian added.
“I agree; I think there could be many of us out there. I mean, the only grigori we know about are those that fell in line with Arael, there could be countless others who had children,” Angelica said.
“I suppose so,” Joya agreed. “And maybe even grigori that didn’t follow Arael. The grigori are also called the watchers, right? The name didn’t become perverse until Arael became one of them. So that means he wasn’t the first — there were watchers and grigori before him. I can’t imagine all of them fell in line with him.”
“You’re right, he only had twelve followers.” Jovian hadn’t really thought about it before.
“Exactly; yet the Carloso tells us that the Goddess sent down many, right?”
Jovian nodded.
“I would like to meet them some day,” Angelica said. She looked up above her. She longed for nothing more than to see the stars in the night sky, but even those were blotted out by the darkness. The glowing clouds, like wisps of spirits floating to the Otherworld, should have done something to alleviate the darkness encroaching on her mind, but they only succeeded in putting her more on edge. Angelica never thought she could get used to living in this realm. She was happy she was only passing through. She settled for imagining that the winking lights of the sunflowers above were the stars she so longed to see.
“Except the rephaim,” Jovian said. “They are supposed to be evil, dead half-breeds.”
“Do you think they are all dead?” Angelica asked.
Joya shivered.
“There’s no telling. Anakim are supposed to have long necks, right? And nephilim are supposed to be giants?” Jovian asked.
“I think it has more to do with their power,” Joya contributed. “Like, maybe the anakim having long necks just means they’re more prone to seeing further into the future, like you two can do.”
“And the nephilim just have greater power?” Angelica asked.
“And the rephaim might just deal with death,” Joya agreed with a nod.
“Like Cianna,” Jovian said.
“Except Cianna isn’t a half-breed — she was born of Arael and Pharoh, she is full angel,” Joya reminded them.
“But the power would be similar, wouldn’t you think?” Angelica said.
“I really couldn’t tell you. I imagine the rephaim would have some dealing with death, but not like a necromancer,” Joya said. “I have the feeling we wouldn’t really want to find out, though; maybe they gain power from death.”
Jovian stared at his older sister for a time, trying to think of how to bring up what he had been wanting to ask her since meeting up with her again in the Mirror of the Moon, but he had never had time. He’d stopped thinking about it for a while, since she had seemed like the regular old Joya, but lately something had been changing in her.
“What’s it like?” Jovian asked. “Being a sorceress. How do you know some of the things you know?”
“I’m not really sure.” Joya sounded as if she had been expecting the question. “Before my trials I had the book, and at times the Voice of Wyrd would speak to me, tell me things that I should know, and at other times just take me over completely. Now that I’ve gone through my trials, that voice is constantly with me in my head, but it isn’t a voice, it’s knowing what I have to do, or the truth of a situation.” Joya set her book down for a moment, her gaze distant. “I guess you could say it’s almost like a universal consciousness that all sorcerers can tap into.”
“Like having the world’s largest library in your head, and you can access any of the information inside it by just wanting to know it?”
“A mental library?” Joya thought about that for a moment. “I guess, but I mean, my knowledge isn’t endless. Maybe that comes with time?”
“Odd,” Angelica said, screwing up her face. “So this Voice of Wyrd is actually a part of you now?”
“So it would seem,” Joya said. “I don’t hear it like I used to, but I still feel it with me. Maybe since I’ve joined with my wyrd, it’s more a part of me now than it was.”
“What were the trials like? Grace told us they were very personal, and that most sorcerers wouldn’t speak of it,” Jovian pried, hoping that maybe it wasn’t so private that Joya wouldn’t share it with them.
“She was right, they are very private. But I can tell you that when I finished, I met the Voice of Wyrd, and she gave me something — an orb of sorts. She told me that it would help me, that this would give me the strength to do what had to be done. It was sorcery, it was the power to draw on wyrd whenever I had need of it.”
Angelica and Jovian shared a telling look.
“And I know now that Baba Yaga isn’t bad. Baba Yaga is the Voice of Wyrd, and I know she met you two. I know that’s how you knew about the Mirror of the Moon.”
“We wanted to tell you,” Jovian said sheepishly.
“That doesn’t matter now; you did what you thought you should.” Joya sighed, and her face twitched uncontrollably from the touch of the verax-acis, which seemed like it had happened ages ago, though it had only been a few short weeks. When she had it back under control, she took a deep breath. “I also know that you two are different — how different, I’m not sure. I can only imagine it has to do with our parents and the fact that we are all a little strange.”
“Joya, do you think you could do something for us?” Angelica asked when their sister resumed her entry to the herb book.
“What’s that?” she asked distractedly, trying to get the petals on the flower she was drawing to match the waning sunflower lying on the ground beside her.
“You said Jovian and I are different. We have wyrd. We’ve even used it at times, but we haven’t been able to learn to call it at will. It took all we had back with the gnomes to do anything at all.” Angelica eased forward. “Do you think you could teach us to channel our wyrd?”
“I don’t see why not. It shouldn’t be much different than how I cast mine.”
“Perfect,” Jovian said, and smiled.
Finally they were going to learn how to use the wyrd inside of them.
About Travis
Travis Simmons was kicked out of magic school for his refusal to study and his penchant for mundane activities like cooking. While selling his sword he stumbled upon dogs that he wrongly thought were magical and imagined he could commune with them. After a vicious zombie attack in which witches helped him push back the undead horde, Travis found himself apprenticed to a necromancer.
Afraid that winter was coming, Travis tucked into his magical studies, but always chased his dreams of writing tales science fiction tales and fantasy stories where he could explore his wild imagination about life on other planets. Adamant that Travis learn the esoteric ways of the occult his master made his life a horror of practice and studies. But no matter how he tried, he could never conquer Travis' questing mind.