Chapter 23

High at noon both the sun and the moment reached their inevitable peak.

The glaciers had been melting rapidly. Trickles of ice and snow became streams, and then rivers that ran tumbling down the mountainsides all around in countless falls. The air had grown warm despite the elevation, and swiftly became oppressive, finally warranting the casting aside of Deh Leccend’s warming cloak, but Shannon had not yet released his frame’s reassuring touch.

She needed it just to hold onto her slender shred of resolve, but she almost abandoned all hope of seeing her duty through to the end as the glaciers and aged ice and snow beneath them began to give way more rapidly.

She wanted to bolt and run, but to where, she wouldn’t have the slightest clue. She couldn’t have so much as hoped for a direction to go, even if she was to begin fleeing. And even if she could have brought herself to pick a direction, she knew, she would never make it clear of the Everest’s immensity in a matter of mere hours. Even if she could manage that, she knew, she would never escape the Powers, for Deh had assured her several times. The Powers would consume the whole of the earth’s face and more. Not even the Veil of the Leaf’s Edge could save her. Not even if she could manage to flee into it under her own power.

The coming of Micqael was then abrupt. It brought these fears into the real, stacking them all upon her so quickly Shannon staggered to prepare herself.

It began with the Black Leaf. He bolted to his feet, extricating himself from her tangled touch like oil and smoke, impossible to hold onto, but its touch impossible to forget. His abandonment left her jarred, but she scrambled to catch up as he offered his hand to help her rise.

“He is coming!” Deh shouted, dragging her to her toes, but suddenly she was beyond her own two feet.

Deh gaped at her weightlessness. His voice was lost to her ears, feeble before a series of violent tremors within the mountain. But it only grew more difficult to make out the Black Leaf’s thoughts as an utterly shrill, high-pitched whine called out over the world. Like an air-raid siren it rose up, indeed the clear ringing easily confused with the blowing of an angel’s horn at the dumping out of God’s wrathful bowls. Golden light descended upon them, enveloping the entire peak of the Everest.

“Deh!?” Shannon cried to him, buoyed from her feet and drifting into the air, as he remained firmly planted upon the suddenly vaporizing snows. Left behind to gape in awe, Deh couldn’t answer her, and without his protection, she panicked. Helpless and out of her human element, Shannon flailed.

“Deh!” She screamed again, as the light intensified around them, like a lingering beam from some science-fiction satellite-borne laser cannon. She struggled to right herself, but doing so only caused her to windmill out of control, permitting her to gaze out across the land –a scrolling panorama filled with rising snow and rock.

Seemingly isolated to the Everest, Miqael’s coming wrought a massive cylinder of anti-gravitational upheaval. Everything drifted into the air just as helplessly as she did. The remaining masses of glaciers shattered and snapped upon the many peaks within the girth of the light, falling away even as they rose up and melted away.

Then there was a new light.

Dim by comparison to the initial beam, this new concentric cylinder of illumination seemed to be bouncing back, miles and miles in diameter. Was that what was bearing the earth’s ruin aloft? Shannon had no way to know, but it certainly looked it.

Shannon was helpless to watch this all come to fruition like a doom upon her. She was powerless, and so too appeared to be Deh Leccend for he gaped up at her, waiting. She could see him over her shoulder. He was shouting something, but she couldn’t make it out, just as he likely couldn’t hear her pleas over the horn that blared over the world. She struggled to watch his lips move, trying to make out what he was shouting.

“Hold on, milady!” He appeared to be crying, but even if he was screaming it until his voice went raw, she would never hear it over the starfire sword’s coming, nor over the rumble of the peaks being torn to shreds.

Suddenly, she felt Him. She could sense his coming. His presence was strong. Terrible power reached down and choked away her fear, clutching her heart in a constrictive vice. Her voice failed, and Shannon gaped into the sun, blinding herself with its brilliance to await her end.

It was over, she knew. She was dead. There was no overcoming a god from else-realms. All that she’d discovered, and all that she’d been through faded from thought –an anti-climactic moment hung upon the clock. Nothing of her life was sorrowfully recalled, and nothing flashed before her eyes but a blackness.

It ripped past her, streaking into the sky.

Deh had crouched below, gathering himself for a tremendous lunge. Shannon didn’t even realize it was the Black Leaf, gone to meet the star-fire. She caught only a glimpse of him trailing his sword, which had grown once more to ridiculous proportions. He brought it to bear like a lance against their foe, but vanished in the blinding glare, gifting Shannon nothing more than the sound of swords meeting in a deafening ring, like mammoth shears snipping together in a lethal drawl.

A report, sharply pinging, then rang out over the land, capping the collision she could not see, and the black streak sailed out and away, drawing her gaze off to the west like a rocket.

It was the Black Leaf, she realized, too late. He powered through rocks and ice and clouds of steam, unhindered in the least, and he disappeared altogether beneath her cry.

“Deh!!” She wailed for his life. Despite his strengths being more than twenty times a single Black Leaf, Deh was gone.

Shannon couldn’t even hear her own voice echoing away amidst the undeniable thunder of the mountains and the resonance of the collision of swords which lingered on like a crystalline glass wind-chime beneath the shrieking whine of Miqael’s descending.

At miles from her presence, Deh Leccend vanished, but she could not stare after him, for she could then hear the starfire sword’s voice. A gleeful howl, it enveloped all other sounds, as he found her in his lightning swift plummet. Her gaze found the light once more in a flicker, but she was far too slow. Something heavy struck her breast with a crunch, and she caught sight of his otherworldly countenance –an inhuman mask of wild hunger, intense and insane.

At that instant, a new light erupted, splaying out from her bosom in cool whiteness that sucked all the sensation and strength right out of her. The piercing of his blade was gone. Sounds faded from thought, and the light of his descending was no longer so bright -gone suddenly dim as she felt the Everest rock bite into the back of her body and head.

For a moment, it was just a dream, an image emblazoned on her mind and recalled flawlessly upon waking. Stretching back to what seemed to be forever beyond him, the Power trailed a river of white hair, streaking out into the sky and stretching away in every direction, like ribbons of mammoth cloud-cover. His wings were all furled back in his plummet, as flame and glaring feather and cords of light that reached back to the very sun itself like the strings of a marionette.

But, on impact, everything went black and stayed that way.

***

Deh Leccend was flung away at the meeting of Miqael’s sword, borne like the terrible lance of power that it was. Through mountainous shards of airborne rock and ice, the Black Leaf was cast down violently. He flew so swiftly it was as if he’d become a dark star-fire shard himself, and so wounded, there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

He plummeted aside so swiftly, it was a mere second before he struck a resistant peak beyond the sundering ring of the Power’s coming, some miles beyond the rising cylinder of light. He struck down with enough force to let it cave, and his impact cast down a great landslide. An avalanche of sheer rock rumbled its way to a new resting place at the far base of the mountain as he too was cast into darkness. Buried in the mountainside, Deh was spared as the land within the chamber of Miqael’s coming was utterly obliterated.

It simply blasted away from his alighting. Entire mountains disintegrated, hammered into no more than sand and clouds, as if numerous huts made of straw before a many kiloton nuclear detonation. There would be nothing left of them when the dust settled, but Deh would not bear witness.

Before he would ever know it, the entire region was simply gone in the blink of an eye. The single greatest catastrophic event mankind would ever witness within their minute recollection of time had come to pass in one fantastic burst. The Everest of Enfaeri and everything within miles of his bed became a flaming, gaping hole in the earth. However, the monstrously monumental occasion passed without many witnesses beyond the unconscious duo.

Out so far in the middle of nowhere, there were perhaps only distant settlements in Tibet or India that might have witnessed. If they did, however, it would matter little. They would be as awestruck, silent, hopeless and inactive as anyone might be who witnessed such mysterious, blinding devastation.

It would be long moments of eerie silence and echoing rushes of vacuumed air returning from the expulsion, before Deh Leccend came back to himself. He rose under his own power within the dark of his tomb, but he was a broken figure from the ruin of his fall.

When he crawled free of his tomb and lay his gaze upon the sea of molten earth that spanned out and away below him, Deh gaped in awe. Not even having witnessed such a lake of fire once before would exempt him from that sort of amazement. It swept through him with a shuddering gasp of failure and terror.

But, the world was silent in the wake of Miqael’s coming. There was nothing but the product to be seen of the fire-fall coming of the star-fire sword. He couldn’t believe it, even though he’d predicted it.

The White Leaves had overcome him, which meant she had to be alive. She was here, somewhere in all this ruin. She had to be.

Ignoring his pain, he scanned the vast countryside, searching all across the sprawl of the molten lake until his sharp elf’s eyes picked out a tiny island at the center of the perfect circle of steaming red, almost all but lost within the vacuumed mists. There lay a tiny shard of whiteness, wreathed in faint, soft pale light.

Shannon.

Deh Leccend dragged himself away from the destruction of his cave, staggering to the very ledge before his feet gave out. He was too weak to go bounding to her rescue. He had to take time working to heal himself as best he could.

***

“Lady White Leaves!” A far echo reached out to her senses, distant and lost beyond her slumber. She cared nothing for it. She wallowed instead, in the depths of her demise. It came again, however, and stirred her to wake.

She felt lethargic, beaten to within a shred of life and sapped of all strength, but her eyes opened. She lay where she’d fallen and gazed into the noon-day sky, blackened. The sun was blotted out by a pluming, terrible cloud rising miles into the atmosphere and spread wide as it reached the ceiling.

The earth vibrated beneath her, calling out to her numbed body in subtle but painful waves.

Again the cry called to her, wrought fearful for all its distance, but now it was clearer –distinctly edged in her recollection. It was Deh, she realized slowly, and she stirred, seeking to rise. Ultra-fine dust beneath her aching hands was like baby powder -cringe-worthy in its softness, but Shannon struggled upward. A dark smudge was inbound across the blackened sky, descending upon her with worrying haste.

Slowly, she took in her surroundings -a small isle of powdered black earth amidst a veritable sea of magma, ringed by six surviving jagged rocks that somehow remained after the obliteration of the Everest. It was a hellish scene -a dismal, inescapable, boiling, inhospitable place. She’d never really believed in Hell, but she could almost believe in it now. If not for Deh Leccend’s promptness, she could have believed that was where she’d ended up.
But she was not in hell. She was beaten and afraid, but she was alive. There could be no doubt.

“Deh!” She turned her eyes back to his approach, loosing a lengthy peel of need. She didn’t quite know what had happened. It had come and gone so swiftly she couldn’t have possibly seen it all unfold. She only knew the heat was unbearable and she was in a very dangerous position.

“Milady!” He cried down to her, prompting her to call out his name again, urgent and pleading. She needed him now more than ever. She needed to feel his strength beneath her hands.

Then, he was there, alighting in his usual, eerily soundless fashion -albeit with a grunt and collapse due to his unseen injuries. He was swift about correcting himself and pulling her to her useless feet, but Shannon couldn’t stand. She could barely move. The Black Leaf was forced to bear her aloft, for she was more broken than he appeared to be -all frayed at his edges like a rag doll having spent too many years as the chew toy of a less than caring junk yard dog.

“Wait. Wait!” She whimpered. Pins and needles ran through her frame. She couldn’t even stand with his support, a limp, useless slip of a body capable of not much more than crying in pains she couldn’t even begin to describe.

“We cannot wait, milady!” He hissed back, plucking her from the earth to bear her cradled frame despite wincing of his own injuries.

“It is not safe here! We must get you away!” He was swift and vehement of tongue, instilling her with greater fears. She still didn’t know what had happened, but she feared she knew what was coming. She didn’t need to ask it, for Deh Leccend was already going onward as the land began to grumble in wake of Miqael’s catastrophic damage. The earth had begun moving, as it had the last time the Powers had come. They’d reshaped the face of the earth the last time, and the formation of the continents themselves still hadn’t ground to a halt. The Powers were simply that mighty.

All around the mountains that ringed the molten sea were quaking, loosing still further landslides of epic proportion. It was all so staggering to feel and bear witness to, for someone yet struggling to come to grips with so much as finding her air. She just couldn’t take it all in. There was too much, and she certainly couldn’t even hear herself think. Again, it was difficult to hear the Black Leaf’s shouting hisses, even as they were right upon her ear.

“Enfaeri cannot harm you directly, but this molten lake can take you! Hold onto me!” He was shouting, but it was just a fuzzy buzzing in her ear.

“Deh!” She clung to him with all that she could muster, a fruitless effort with failing limbs.

“Deh! What’s happening!?” There was no hiding the fears she felt, but then there was no need to hide them. He was feeling the same, though he bore the weight better than she ever could have hoped.

“Its Enfaeri!” He cried the fire wolf’s name in a lengthy, certain peel, voice gone hoarse. He spoke, and so it was. Even as he shouted his answer and set to bear her away, the mound of refined dust beneath them rose up with a heave, jumping to life with wicked flame and throwing him to his knees with a jarring jolt. They took a nasty spill, but Deh Leccend managed to spare her most of the impact. He surged up against the uncertain footing, found a crouch and gathered himself as all about, the six jagged stones rose up in unison, being shown for the hooked boulders that they were.

“What about Miqael?!” She shouted back, as loudly as she could manage where lacking breath would avail her voiceless.

“You did it milady Fireacsweise! My White Leaves! You captured him as I predicted!” Deh shouted upon her ear.

“You’ve sent him back!” He was ecstatic for the fact, but the immanent coming of Enfaeri, the fire hound, left him panicked, drowning out any and all hope or joy to be had from Miqael’s rejection. The isle and its ringing hooks began to sink into the molten mire, shores dwindling and granting the burning tide new heights to claim.

With her figure cradled close, the Black Leaf lunged up and away, bearing her safely free of the sea of flame in another mighty arc. At length he alighted to set her upon the nearest of the far standing peaks and again he staggered to collapse. This time, he corrected well, then wheeled about with her safely settled. Even as he rested her, Deh Leccend was prepared. He stood bold, staring back upon the vanishing isle as the earth shuddered in the rising of the second Power.

This one, he knew, would be much more difficult to overcome, for Enfaeri was wild and would seek only to flee Shannon’s presence the moment he caught wind of her. If he passed freely away, the sky would burn, and the seas would boil and roil beneath the waking of the bound brothers of the waters. The sky itself was already blackened but for a three-hundred and sixty degree strip of light on the dwindling horizons, but it was growing darker by the moment in the waking of the others, the unbound brothers, the Bahthalamuts.

There below them sank away the island of Shannon’s fall, but within a moment the rocky, jagged horns that ringed the dome of Enfaeri returned.

The powdered earth that buried him tumbled free as black sand and molten streams, and her place of rest was now shown to be the head of the second Power.

He rose up, and continued to rise, a monstrous, giant beast undiminished by the size of his molten sea. Beside the hooked crown that grew from his skull, he bore two great twisted earthen horns of impenetrable blackness off the back of his head, which were mimicked by his lengthy wild ears. He howled a great cry as he opened his gleaming eyes for the first time in many millennia, and he heaved up -lunging out of the bowl of his reawakening.

Surging free without restraint, Enfaeri bounded into the sky, throwing molten waves rippling away to at length splash tremendously up the mountainsides and go rolling back in his absence. He was both terrible and huge. He was staggering in his ungodly presence.

“Stay here and be ready!” Deh Leccend shouted upon her, lunging free of her desperate, scrambling clutches. He did not wait for argument and offered her nothing in preparation. He simply went.

The Black Leaf bounded into the sky with the speed and swiftness that now only he possessed, but Enfaeri was capable of even greater feats than had been shown by his mere awakening.

Freed of his Everest prison, he took to the sky as a terror. All down his rippling back, Shannon saw his spine, wrought of great horns of ragged stone, jutting out of bristling crimson fur, and at the end hung six mighty tails, borne of flame. Over several hundred feet in length, the fire wolf was less wolf and more demon than anything she could have prepared for. She hadn’t even gotten a glimpse of Miqael really, and now she stood entirely unprepared for his unbound brother.

Deh Leccend, however, was all over its rising. Unseen from behind the great Power, he flew forth, catapulted by an explosive take-off. However, he vanished instantly, ascending and traversing the Veil of the Leaf’s Edge in the same movement, granting himself the swiftness by which he might strike unseen and unhindered. He knew the Veil would not mask him from Enfaeri’s senses as it would against humans. No such luck would grant him benefit. However, it would grant him the speed to strike down his foe –speed the demon did not also possess.

The Wolf’s ears twitched with the drawing forth of his magnificent blade, and it sought to wheel upon his foolish approach. But the Black Leaf was beyond swift. Gone and back again within the blink of an eye, he’d covered the distance and struck with all the momentum he could carry. His blade was suddenly unfathomably long, forged into an greater lance than Shannon had ever seen, as he pounded home upon the wolf’s dome, striking hard and sure at the top of its terrible triplicate of maws.

He lanced home at the base of its snout, striking powerfully enough between its sinister gleaming eyes to rock forth its head into an unnatural hunching motion. The sword pierced cleanly through in a single knifing ringing of unmasked sound, but Enfaeri finished his turnabout nonetheless. It appeared the demon had no choice in the matter. The collision of their might seemed to cause a wild spin as even one-armed and wounded to half-futility by the starfire sword’s stroke, Deh bore down against the fire wolf. He forcefully pried the hound around, and for all the deafening volume of its wailing howls of denial and agony, the Black Leaf’s voice could be heard as he bent the beast beneath his full furies.

“You’re going back to sleep, Demon!” His tongue was a shriek, and the exertion of the collision was furious beyond all compare to anything Shannon had ever seen. The Black Leaf wrenched the demon wolf around by its head, bending its high leap into a frightful plummet and riding him forcibly down. They fell right for the White Leaves, undoubtedly by Deh Leccend’s guidance, but the three maws screamed of their own fury, spewing flame. The wound in its snout erupted the same, and Deh Leccend disappeared in the sudden gout.

She cowered before the onslaught, trembling and quailing before the might of their fall. She feared for her life more than Deh’s own in that moment, but the momentum was lost on the combatants as Enfaeri gained his bearings, reaching up and swatting the Black Leaf with a single mighty hand. It struck him hard, catching him fully on with a back-handed swipe as if to remove a stinking wasp.

Deh careened way as easily beneath Enfaeri as Micquael, leaving Shannon alone before its fall. Much to her luck and relief, the wolf fell short, wheeling about even as it plummeted, and with a thunderous crash it landed hard on its backside at the foot of her mountain, sending out waves of molten-earth and a great, pulsing inferno. The peak shook beneath her, and Shannon simply quailed there, watching abhorrently as the fire wolf moved came to rest, and recovered, gaining its feet and shaking its head. It snorted and growled, and spewed yet further huge waves of fire. The land shuddered anew beneath his power, beneath his pure presence of destruction, then he rose up, wheeling again, and leaped away. The demon bounded through the lake unharmed by its heat and unhindered by its soupy resistance.

He ran at length, splashing through the sea his brother had made of his bed, and once free, he ran onward like a true wolf, scrambling up the mountainsides that hemmed in the bowl of magma. And he only continued on without a backward glance, leaving a blackened trail of ash through the Himalayan range. He simply raced to escape the Black and White Leaves.

“Deh!” Shannon finally called when it was clear the wolf would not be returning. She feared the Black Leaf lost again, and herself now stuck on a nameless mountain in the middle of nowhere in the Himalayas. She cried repeatedly for him, eyes scanning to where he’d vanished, but there was nothing to see.

She had not the sharp eyes of an Elvine, but eventually, her cries and tears and sobbing finally received a response. She saw Deh rise up against the darkened sky, having breached the light that lingered as a thin strip on the four horizons to disappear within the blackness of the sky. She scanned, trying to track his approach, but there would be no seeing until he was right on top of her.

He came to her calls as a dutiful hound, but he alighted upon her presence and crumbled, dropping to his knees as if his frame was ruined. He looked a wreck, frayed and singed and covered in dust and debris, and he was injured in some way that was not readily discernible. He gasped and grimaced as he collapsed there with her, and Shannon knelt upon his presence, touching his hunched backside with her delicate hand.

“Deh!” She worried, and it shone in more than her voice. The Black Leaf merely hunched there, gasping and panting his efforts.

“I…” He tried. “I…” But he couldn’t get the words to come out until he raised his dirtied features to meet her gaze.

“I’m--- sorry.” He panted.

“I’m sorry, milady.” He choked down his parched throat.

“I… I tried to stop it.” His breath didn’t seem to wish to be kept, having inhaled more than his fair share of the Enfaeri-fires.

“I…I really did.” There were tears in his eyes, but not wrought of pain. They were wrought of his failure, and Shannon pouted for him, lips drooping pitifully as she moved to hug onto his frame. She feared he was going to die, and she clung to him, resting back and pulling him to lay at rest. He slumped in her arms, sprawled out on his backside, helpless as she clung to him. He was panting and fading. She could feel it, and Shannon wept for the Black Leaf, wishing desperately that he would live. She begged only for his survival, and so it was.

The power she’d been granted as kin to the Elvine, the power she was born to possess, was unleashed and the air cooled about them. The sound of all things dwindled to a dull buzz as she empathically stole away his pains, healing him even as she wept.

For a time, they remained there, until Deh Leccend felt himself growing stronger. He laid still and did not let her know she was working her magic, for it seemed to him, she was strongest whilst unwitting, and he needed to be strong for her. He needed her help to be that strength. But, when he was rejuvenated, and his flesh felt strong, the Black Leaf pulled free of her touch, rising up miraculously before her eyes.

He wore a saddened look, moved by the tears she shed for him. He felt dismal in his failure, but was beginning to form a plan for the undoing of the Powers. He just had to think on it for a while to get it just right.

“I’m sorry, milady.” He admitted once again, moving to wipe away her tears.

“I failed to stop him for you. I tried, but I was not strong enough.” And at his tongue, Shannon’s sniffling slowed sharply. Her emotions up-ended suddenly as she realized they were still alive, and even though they’d failed to stop it all outright, they could still try. She grew determined at the sign of his returned strengths, and she fed upon it, building a fire within herself.

“We aren’t dead yet, Deh.” She said, wiping away the last of her tears as she seethed, growing fierce.

“There are many we can still save.” She turned from him, setting her eyes on the eastern horizons, which grew black by the passing of Enfaeri. The sky was beginning to rain, but it was no more than cinders, ashes and tiny embers. It was as though biblical fire and brimstone had indeed begun falling, but it was not so fierce. It was rather almost gentle, like a lazy snowfall of light and dark.

“We must catch Enfaeri, and give him his leaf.” She said, and her tongue was solid. She was utterly certain, and growing more bold than the Black Leaf had seen since she’d exposed herself to him within the bathing houses of Addl’laen. She was coming back to herself again, having been swept helplessly up in this cataclysmic end to mankind. She was beginning to come to grips with what it was that she must do for the sake of all the limbs and kin of the great tree. Slowly, she dragged herself to her feet, and stood as boldly as her tongue was solid.

“Come on, my Black Leaf. I know what it is I must do.” She said certainly.

“You must take me to him before he consumes the world.” And finally her whitened, silver-shard gaze found his wet ash depths, cast down upon him, and Deh Leccend was abashed. She was more beautiful than the great tree herself, for she was the daughter of Addl’laen in truth. The little white-leaved pale limb that grew of her dome like a featherine adornment shone gleaming against the blackness of the sky, and he was pulled by her need.