54: HUNTING FOR VALATHEA
(Grizzst’s story)
Grizzst wondered if this was some cosmic force’s idea of humor. He briefly entertained the notion Valathea had gone into the mountains pursuing Rev’arric, which opened up the unfortunate possibility she’d been collateral damage in their fight. He hoped not. The Raenena Mountains were vast. Multiple dragons could spend centuries roaming its peaks and valleys without ever crossing paths. And that was true of a vané queen and a voras wizard as well.
Finding her would be luck as much as craft.
Fortune was with him, or rather the dreth. After checking a dozen settlements, presenting himself politely at their bunker entrances each time, he finally encountered one who’d seen a vané woman pass through. They’d entreated him not to follow her; she was clearly a fool. They’d told her a dragon was active in the area, but she hadn’t heeded their warning.
Which dragon? Nobody was sure, but they’d all heard its roar. Nobody fancied venturing above ground for an identification.
So Grizzst would have to find out the hard way. At least he knew Valathea had survived. Or at least, she’d still been alive to trade with that particular dreth settlement.
A week later, he identified the dragon. Some were easier to spot than others. Sharanakal tended to create volcanic activity wherever he went and rarely traveled far from water. Baelosh liked to stay below the tree line, and Gorokai—well, the dreth wouldn’t have recognized Gorokai as a dragon at all. There’d have been no mistaking Morios, and they’d have never heard Drehemia, who would have slipped through their world like an unseen plague. Rol’amar and Xaloma both would have brought stories of walking dead with their passing, if in radically different flavors. And, for obvious reasons, Rev’arric was no longer a candidate.
That left Aeyan’arric.
If Grizzst had been searching for anyone but Valathea—if Rev’arric’s warning not to mention him hadn’t echoed still through Grizzst’s head—he might have gone back to fetch the wizard-turned-dragon. Rev’arric’s ability to control dragons would have been handy. But it was too risky should they stumble across Valathea unexpectedly.
Grizzst stopped looking for Valathea and started tracking the dragon instead. Where he found one, he’d find the other.
It turned out to be both easier and harder than Grizzst had anticipated. Easier: he only had to look for the largest storm in the range and find Aeyan’arric at its heart. Harder: he didn’t particularly feel like stumbling onto the dragon in the middle of a blizzard.
While he was searching for shelter, he heard a massive rumbling noise. He looked upward toward the mountains, the driving snow making sight difficult. Still, it was a distinctive sound.
“Aw, fuc—” He started casting, but it was too late.
The avalanche overtook him.
When Grizzst woke, he lay on the ground in a cave. He didn’t feel particularly injured. He didn’t even feel bruised, which should have been the least of his injuries after having tons of snow dropped on his head. Someone had rescued him, moved him, and healed him.
The air was comfortable instead of freezing. A large fire had been built in the center, smoke filtering out through a small chimney in the ceiling. Grizzst couldn’t see the cave opening from his position.
Sitting next to the fire was the woman he’d been seeking.
Valathea looked like a flower bundled in furs, something fragile and delicate never meant to survive winter’s chill. Her hair, soft as curling mist, had been woven in elaborate braids against her head, accentuating her heart-shaped face. She had a notebook open in her lap, where she’d been writing. She set the quill aside when he sat up.
“Thanks,” Grizzst said. “I’d have been lunch for some lucky wolf pack next spring if you hadn’t found me.”
“This is a bad place to be caught outdoors, Grizzst,” she told him. “Even for one such as yourself. I hope whatever you’re seeking was worth it.”
“I guess we’ll see, since you’re who I was—wait. How do you know my name?” He moved closer to the fire, where a kettle of something warm waited.
Her smile was kind. “Save god-kings, there’s only one voras left in the whole world. So you must be Grizzst. Please, help yourself.”
“How did you know I’d survived?” Her logic was sound, but Grizzst had thought he’d done a better job of avoiding attention. A bowl sat next to the kettle, so he ladled himself a serving. It looked like porridge, but he didn’t care what it tasted like, as long as it was warm.
“N’ofero told me your name,” Valathea admitted, naming the deceased leader of the voras Assembly. “He’d asked me to look at the ritual and give him my feedback, which I did. I assumed you’d be unaffected since you were holding the sword.”
“N’ofero went to you?” Grizzst blinked. “You must be one hell of a wizard.”
“He respected my opinion,” Valathea corrected. “The world is less for his absence.” She pulled a cloth square from her satchel, shaped it in her hands, and blew on it until it had the hardness and polish of pottery. She poured her own serving into the created bowl. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit? And how did you know where I’d be?”
“Oh, your husband said you were hunting dragons in the mountains.”
“Hunting? No. Studying.” Valathea held up her journal, filled with pages of neat, precise handwriting. “I keep hoping I’ll find a way to reverse what was done. I feel … responsible.”
Grizzst rubbed his eyes and set his bowl to the side. “Excuse me? That wasn’t your fault.”
“Oh, it was a little bit my fault,” she said. “Do you remember much about politics? From the old days?”
“Well, I always remembered to vote, but…” Grizzst suddenly felt uncomfortable. “I didn’t pay much attention, to be honest. I never ran for office or anything. I wasn’t anyone important.”
“And now you are very important,” she said. “How the world changes. But you do remember the Preceptors, I assume?”
Grizzst frowned. “Multinational group, right? Their leader was, uh…” He bit his lip and squinted. “A’val, I think?”
Valathea smiled. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. I was leader of the Preceptors. And that meant, among our other duties, the choice as to whom would be made Guardians fell to us. To me. I approved every single one.”
“Okay, wow. Uh, I had no idea…” Grizzst swallowed. No wonder Rev’arric had thought she wouldn’t exactly be a fan. If she was the person who’d approved who became a Guardian, then presumably she was also the person who said who would never become a Guardian.
Namely, Rev’arric himself.
“So you can understand how I might feel some culpability.”
“It wasn’t one of the Eight who caused all this mess,” Grizzst said. He made a point to not mention how he’d just woken that guilty party from a millennia of insanity and formed a pact with him. No need to go chasing trouble.
“No,” Valathea said. “N’ofero believed the demons were responsible, but I knew better. Right from the start, I knew better.” She looked away. “I should have recognized Rev’arric’s ambitions much earlier. A friend even tried to warn me how jealous he was of his brother, S’arric, how Rev’arric hated that I hadn’t cleared him to take part in the ritual. But I thought their own emotions were clouding their judgment.”
“Why would you let him anywhere near the ritual if you—”
She made an inarticulate, exasperated noise. “Rev’arric invented the ritual! He made the Eight Guardians. I knew he was egotistical, but I thought his focus remained on defeating the demons. Why would anyone ever think he wanted to destroy—or at the very least supplant—what he had himself created?” She slumped, deflated, the anger draining away from her voice to a tired, worn trickle. “Did you ever meet him?”
“Rev’arric? I, uh … I saw him lecture a few times.”
She smiles wryly. “I knew him much better than that. Not—” She responded to Grizzst’s widening eyes. “Not like that. We were never friends, let alone lovers. But I like to think he respected me. Maybe I was a fool to think so. Rev’arric was brilliant, charming, and passionate. But also narcissistic, manipulative, and completely lacking remorse. Why would someone so convinced of his rightness ever need to feel doubt or guilt? And after all, he usually was right. But this time”—Valathea pressed her lips into a thin line—“Rev’arric had expected me to give him the role I instead gave to Argas. He never protested my decision either. Rev’arric ran the ritual perfectly: tied Argas to the proper concept. But I think that was the moment he started to think of all of the Preceptors—me especially—as his enemies. The moment he felt we’d betrayed him. The moment he started making his plans for the second iteration of the ritual, the one that went so very wrong.”
She gestured toward what Grizzst had to assume was the cave opening. “I feel terrible about the people he pulled into that ritual, the ones who ended up like … that. I’m certain none of them expected to end up as monsters. I keep hoping I might discover some cure.”
Grizzst started to explain about the Cornerstones, but then stopped himself. Because while he agreed with her, he didn’t agree with all her statements. The conversations he’d had with some dragons had suggested their involvement hadn’t been innocent, at least in a few cases. Did these godlike beings who’d betrayed their own families deserve to be cured? Maybe. Maybe not.
The only reason he’d fixed Rev’arric was because he’d had no other choice.
“I’m trying to resurrect the Eight Guardians,” Grizzst finally said. “I thought … you might be able to help me.”
She stared at him from other side of the flickering light, the campfire reflected in her large violet eyes. Valathea said nothing.
“Well, seven of the Guardians, anyway. I’ve been trying for centuries, but always running up against the same problem.”
“Mortal matter’s inability to contain that level of tenyé.”
Grizzst tried his hardest not to let his disappointment show. That she immediately knew the issue meant she’d already given the matter thought. It meant she’d tried to solve the problem.
It meant she’d failed.
He pressed ahead as if she hadn’t just subtly told him she couldn’t help. “Someone told me you’re the best when it comes to biological magics. I was hoping you might see something I have missed.”
The queen sighed. “Even if I did, the discovery would be inconsequential. I have done enough research to know the seven Guardians slain at Vol Karoth’s hands are beyond our touch. Their souls were cleaved from their bodies, yes, but those souls are … scattered. Discorporate. Stretched like a thin sheen of oil across the universal waters. How would you condense them back into something that could even be placed in a body?”
Grizzst shrugged. “Oh, I figured that out centuries ago.”
Valathea blinked at him. “You did?”
“Sure. Souls don’t want to be—what did you call it? Scattered? They want to be whole. Give them the excuse and they’ll re-form. They’ll heal. The universe wants it that way. The problem is without a body to house them, they never have enough time to kindle thought processes and just—” He made a fist with his fingers and then opened his hand suddenly.
“Perhaps in the Second World, where a physical body isn’t required?”
“I’ve thought of that, but they weren’t killed in the Second World. They were killed here in the First. I have no way to force their souls to cross the Veil. Besides, souls can’t channel tenyé without a physical body to support the exchange. If it were that easy, the Guardians would have resurrected themselves.”1
Queen Valathea finished her porridge and set the bowl aside. “That is a conundrum. But then, I suppose if there was easy solution, one of us would have come up with something centuries ago.”
Grizzst swallowed the crushing disappointment. “Is there nothing you think can be done? There’s—” He exhaled. “Vol Karoth’s prison is failing.”
Her violet eyes widened.
“That was supposed to last forever.”
“It’s not going to,” Grizzst said. “We need the Eight back.”
She seemed small and childlike, the shadows cast on the cave wall behind her very large. Grizzst felt like he was telling scary stories around a campfire. It was just that this particular scary story happened to be true.
Valathea didn’t speak. She stared intently into the burning coals as if she might divine some answer there.
Finally, she said, “A few hundred years after the Cataclysm, some of my people’s younger members became … discontent. They felt these new mortal voras posed a threat, too short-lived to remember or honor the old agreements between our groups. They believed that with voras knowledge lost, your people would degenerate.”
Grizzst made a face. “They weren’t wrong.”
“Again, we should’ve listened better,” Valathea said. “Been more sympathetic to the concerns of those younger than ourselves. Ironically, just as we vané were once younger than our voras parents. But we didn’t and weren’t, and so eventually, a large group left. They migrated to the summer lands we keep and declared it a sovereign nation.”
Grizzst stamped down his impulse to tell her to get to the damn point. “I see,” he lied.
She smiled. “I doubt that. I’m telling my tale very circuitously. Dreadfully boring, I imagine. But you see, within the Manol Jungle, there is a special tree. Special enough that it might be capable of containing a Guardian’s tenyé. I know of no other living creature capable of doing so, or at least no other living creature capable of doing so that isn’t already sentient. I recommend you start with Galava. She can form the bodies you need for the others.” The queen paused. “Apologies. That was rude of me. I’m quite sure you’ve already thought of that.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Grizzst straightened. “So if the Manol is now a separate nation…”
“There’s some tension, but overall, we’re on friendly terms. And Sovereign Khaevatz will help you. After all, she’s Khaemezra’s daughter.”
Grizzst’s eyes widened. Khaemezra might have been a Guardian, but she wasn’t vané. Which meant the vané who’d left for the Manol had been open-minded indeed.
“I’ll try that. Thank you.”
Valathea nodded. “If you like, I’ll be happy to open a gate for you and make introductions. Like my own nation, the Manol aren’t necessarily friendly to strangers who show up unannounced.”
“Again, that would be kind of you.” Grizzst suddenly felt this might work out.
“With that said, have you considered … not … resurrecting the Eight?”
Grizzst startled. “What? Of all people, I assumed you’d want to see them brought back.” Rev’arric would be just floored to find out Valathea shared his distaste for the idea.
She pursed her lips. “I haven’t quite decided.”
Grizzst hadn’t expected pushback from her. “We need them.”
“Perhaps,” she acknowledged, “but ask yourself a question. Seven of the Eight have been spread out across the universe for over a thousand years. If you coalesce them again, what will you be bringing back?”