Firebrand

Ride, ride, ride, came the ghost voices.

Karigan sat upon Salvistar’s back. By the time he rose, she was armored in star steel, a winged helm upon her head. She held a shining lance and a shield with the device of the crescent moon glowing in an ethereal pearlescence. She was cradled in a war horse’s saddle, and though a chafron of star steel protected his face, he wore no bridle, for no bit would he tolerate.

“Karigan!” Estral cried, but her voice was lost upon the wind as Salvistar turned on his haunches and sprang into the shroud of snow.

“Karigan, what do you see?” Estral asked.

Her friend stared intently into space, standing stock still, snow crowned on her head and blanketed her shoulders.

“You need me,” Karigan murmured to someone whom Estral could not see.

What in damnation? “Who are you talking to?” Estral demanded.

“I cannot ride,” Karigan said. “I am injured, weak.”

And hallucinating? Estral stood, took a step forward, but suddenly Karigan was gone and in her place was a knight clad in gleaming armor, sitting atop an astonishing horse. Estral rubbed her eyes to make sure she was not the one hallucinating.

“Karigan?” she whispered.

The stallion pawed the ground with a massive hoof. He gazed at her, and she knew she’d met death.

“Karigan!” she cried, but then they were gone.

Estral dropped to her knees, and snow soaked through her trousers. “Oh, gods, oh, gods . . .”

Connly dashed into the campsite, his hair gone gray with the snow. “Lady Estral, what is it?”

“Karigan. She’s gone.”

“What? What do you mean she’s gone?”

“I—she . . .” Estral’s memory of a conversation with Enver came back to her. Karigan had inhaled the spirits of the dead from the pyre they’d burned at the old lumber camp. He had explained that because of Karigan’s ability to step across the thresholds of other worlds, she was able to communicate with the dead, and that there was an entity that acted through her. “Who is this entity?” Estral had asked. “Your god of death,” he replied. It had been too incredible to believe, but Estral had seen her command the ghosts of the lumber camp. There was so much about her friend she did not understand, and now this, the truth before her, incredible or not.

She rose and crossed over to where she’d last seen Karigan standing. Already her footprints were filling in with snow. Estral reached down and picked up Karigan’s bonewood staff. It was like she had vanished from all existence.

Connly stood beside her and touched her arm. “Lady Estral, what do you mean she is gone?”

“She is the death god’s own.”

STELLAR FIRE

The landscape blurred by as the stallion ran like an arrow driving through the falling snow. In a leap, they were across the rocky plain and into the woods, his hoofbeats silent upon the ground. New spirits rose from fresh corpses along the way, and she might have paused to aid them on their journey beyond the living world, but as avatar, she knew the Aeon Iire was broken and that there was no time to waste.

The stallion flew through the woods. Mundane concerns of everyday existence, of who she was and what her life meant, were as nothing. She was only the avatar, Westrion’s servant. The rest did not matter and remained some forgotten memory.

Deeper into the forest were more corpses and more spirits. Some swung swords as though they were still in the midst of combat and did not realize they were dead. The number of corpses half-buried in the snow increased as they went on. To the avatar, it did not matter which side the spirits had fought on, or why they fought, or even that they had died. The matters of the living were of no interest. However, the darkness that threatened the dead—their corpses and their souls—did.

The avatar encountered the first of the escaped hovering over corpses of those who looked to have been fleeing. The dark spirits balked at her arrival, and the stallion trampled them. There were many more throughout the woods. Some attacked, but she repelled them with her shield or ran them through with her lance.

“Come,” she called to them. “You must return to your prison.”

The dark ones, whether winged, scaled, or incorporeal, resisted, but hers was the voice of command overlain by that of a god, and she drew them along with her, willing or not.

She arrived at the edge of the forest where there was a clearing around the Ifel Aeon, collecting more of the demons as she went. The clearing was full of the living combating the dark spirits, and they were losing badly.

Zachary’s inner fire turned to desperation. He screamed at his soldiers to hold their ground, to focus on killing the entities. He raised his sword, now coated in black gore, to slay a scaled creature, when there was a break in the onslaught, an easing. He sensed the creatures recoiling, like an inhalation.

The snowfall changed course again, away from another who came from the woods. He blinked sweat or blood from his eyes in an attempt to see clearly. There was nothing, but something . . . The demons scattered before it.

Again the world slowed, individual snowflakes of intricate design and prismatic dimension hovering in space. For a moment that stretched infinitely, everything else vanished from existence except for the snow and an armored figure on a magnificent stallion. The stallion was black, but not the black coal of the burning hells that were the demons. No, the stallion encompassed the cosmos, the brilliant light of stars, the amorphous tints of celestial clouds and colorful planetary bodies. Like his rider, he was armored, a chafron upon his face. His mane and tail flowed in no natural breeze, and snow did not touch him.