Lightbringer

Audric guided Atheria to the top of a tall stone platform Grand Magister Florimond had constructed at the lake’s outer shore. He dismounted Atheria and looked out upon the Flats. Twenty thousand soldiers turned to watch him—his own troops, and those from Mazabat. He touched the forged amplifier at his belt, a gift from Miren. His father had used it the day of the Boon Chase. To celebrate another year of peace in our kingdom.

He raised Illumenor until the soldiers quieted. Citizens within the walls would be listening, too, watching the Flats with fear in their hearts. Many of them knew this fight was hopeless. Far fewer understood that the true fight would not be on the battlefield between humans and angels.

It would be between him and Rielle, wherever it was that he found her. If he could convince her to use her power against the army she had created, then perhaps the tide would turn.

Otherwise, the city, the country—the world—would fall. Of this he was certain. The world will fall, Aryava had said centuries before. Two queens will rise.

Only once in recent months had Audric allowed himself to look upon those words with hope. Alone in his bed in Mazabat, Ludivine’s news sitting in his gut like a stone, he had recited the familiar words. Two queens will rise. Rielle, after he had won back her loyalty. And then, in the aftermath of war, their daughter. A princess of peace, and someday a queen.

Atop the tower of stone, Audric lowered his sword. Around him, the air pulled taut with tense silence.

May the Queen’s light guide me, he thought, and held in his mind a fuzzy imagining. The shape of his daughter’s face, the weight of her soft head in his arms. What would she look like?

“You are afraid,” he said, his voice booming through the amplifier. Even with its aid, he had to shout to be heard. The night was thick, close, as if the world knew what lay ahead. “You see the darkness coming for us. You hear its roar. I see it too. I hear it in my bones. And I too am afraid. But more than that, I feel love. I feel love for you, for this city we live in, for this country and the people in it, for every farm and every forest, every river and every mountain.”

He began to pace the platform. His cloak whipped at his legs. The air shivered, stirred by the presence of so many gathered elementals.

“We can feel our fear. It is allowed. It is right, and it is human. Our blood will race, our knees will quake. But our hearts…” He shook his head, looked fiercely out at them. Thousands of them, elemental and not, wide-eyed and rapt, their helmets burnished to a shine. Wrists ablaze, swords gleaming silver, fear pulsing at each and every throat.

“Our hearts will not fail us today,” he told them. “This is not a day for fear. It is a day for love. Hundreds of years ago, our saints fought these same enemies and won. They lit the sky with fire, they cast mountains into the sea, and they drove the angels into the Deep. Now they are back, and the saints are long dead. But we are not dead, my friends. We live! And on this day, it will be our swords that bring the enemies to their knees! It will be our power that turns them to ashes where they stand!”

He paused, letting the soldiers’ shouts and cheers rise and wash over him. The sound made him sick with love. He wanted to gather each of them to his chest and hold them there safely until dawn came. He blinked until his eyes cleared.

“Our prayer for so long has been this: May the Queen’s light guide us.” He allowed the words to linger in the air. He knew what they would think, who they would think of, and allowed them to think it. “But I say that we are the light! We are the salvation we have prayed for! We stand on this earth that is our home, and it is we who will drive from it every creature who would dare try to take it from us!”

He turned toward the northern horizon. A black crescent teemed on the mountain pass. For a moment, he considered sending out his thoughts, as Ludivine had taught him. Maybe she would answer. Maybe she had found Rielle and would guide him to her.

But instead, he raised Illumenor. The sun was gone from the sky, but the echoes of its light remained, and still more burned distant beyond the horizon. He pulled every scrap of it his power could find toward the silver flat of his sword, then sent it streaming to the ground in brilliant rays.

“We are the light!” he cried.

They took up the call—his army on the Flats, his people in the city. They echoed him again and again.

Sloane, at the head of her regiment of shadowcasters, her armor black as obsidian, thrust her scepter into the air. The orb at its top glowed blue like the white-hot center of a flame. Its light drew shadows from the earth—wolves and hawks, prowling mountain cats with raised hackles.

Miren’s ax flashed in Illumenor’s light, and the two hundred metalmaster acolytes she commanded punched their castings into the air.

Princess Kamayin held up her fists as if preparing to engage an attacker, her castings glinting at her wrists.

Queen Bazati drew her long, curved sabre, whipping the air into a cyclone.

The Sun Guard, standing below the wall, turned their horses toward the mountains. Evyline’s yells thundered like an anvil’s blows.

Magister Duval and his regiment of windsingers, the city guard, the Sauvillier soldiers who had declared their loyalty to the throne. Odo’s private army of paid knife fighters and archers, all of them now proudly sporting the livery of House Courverie.

Every soldier gathered raised their voice in a furious chorus.

“We are the light!”

Their shouts roared like waves.

“We are the light!”

Audric climbed swiftly onto Atheria’s back. She launched into the air, and the archers on the wall knelt at his departure. They touched their lips, then their eyelids. The prayer of the House of Light.

“We are the light!”

The Sun Guard a gleaming V below him, Audric flew low and fast over the deafening cries of his army. He lifted Illumenor high, cast its light in bright beams through the night. Beneath the steady pound of his heartbeat came a roll of thunder as his army began to charge, following Illumenor’s light. The sharp neighs of eager warhorses, their huffing breaths. The clang of armor, the zip and crackle of elemental magic gathering to strike.

Power raced through Audric’s every vein, warming the plates of his armor. White light shot from his fingers like sparks from a fire.

“We are the light!”

His words broke into screams of fury. Below and behind him, the ocean of his army crested, their war cries splitting open the air. They had reached the wide stretch of the open Flats. A broad field, miles long and miles wide, slightly damp from recent rains. The horses tore up mud with their hooves. Waterworkers pulled rainwater from the ground and spun foaming spirals in the air.

Audric watched the horizon. The angelic front lines had breached the mountains at last and were charging toward them. Beasts plunged across the Flats on grotesquely large forearms, blunt paws, splintered hooves. One—bear-like, enormous, with a mottled hide that looked tough as rocks—whipped its armored tail and shot ribbons of fire. Eerie light flashed—bright and liquid, like moonlit rivers bleached of color. Angelic wings, approaching fast.