71. FALLEN STAR

Kihrin’s story

Dorna’s tent, Jorat

Immediately after Ompher’s arrival

Ompher was in full Immortal mode. Even for a dreth, he looked like nothing so much as an obsidian statue made animate. His eyes were completely white.1 Although he was dressed in clothing, there was no appreciable difference between the rock forming his clothing and the rock forming his skin.

He wasn’t there for me. Ompher barely even glanced in my direction as he stepped toward Dorna.

“What’s your name?” Ompher sneered at Dorna. “I want to know the name of the woman they think can replace my wife.” He gestured; stone from the ground grew up like it was a fast-growing vine and wrapped around Dorna’s legs, trapping her in place.

Shit. I hadn’t once considered this. That Ompher might take huge exception to one other person besides myself and Xaltorath—namely, whoever was tapped to replace Galava. A person who was, at least for the moment, mortal—and vulnerable.

“What? Who the—” Dorna’s piebald face flashed an odd combination of gray and paper white as she realized who Ompher was. Who he had to be. “Ah, goat fucks. Look, I ain’t—” She pressed her lips together and shook her head violently. “I never felt anything but love for Galava. She saved my life. I owe her everything. I only ever loved Tya more.”

Ompher grabbed Dorna by the throat. “Then why are you holding that seed? Did they tell you that you’d be replacing her? Did they tell you that you’d be damning her?”

“Hanik, stop it,” I snapped.²

The God of Earth—more accurately, the Guardian of Matter—stopped and turned, frowning as he seemed to notice me for the very first time.

Yeah, this was … bad. Really bad. Maybe not quite “let’s fight Xaltorath on top of the Chasm” bad, but damn if it wasn’t racing neck and neck for the privilege of being top place on my list of ways I could screw this up.

I sighed. I wasn’t going to let him hurt Dorna, and all I had to stop him with were words. I had to make them count.

“She’s not your enemy,” I said. “And this isn’t damning Novalan. Think this through. Thaena’s dead. So’s Grizzst. That means that even once we kill Xaltorath, Novalan will be free from her imprisonment yet still be out of your reach. Spread out across the universe just like last time. But now? Now she’s not the Guardian of the First World anymore. That means she’ll go to the Afterlife. That means you can ask for her to be Returned. This isn’t insulting your wife’s memory. This is saving her.”

Ompher let go of Dorna, who clutched her throat and bent over, gasping for air.

“How do you know our real names?” Ompher’s eyes widened. “S’arric? Is that you? How is that even possible?”

I put on my best fake smile, my best “we’re not that close” polite stare. It was bullshit. I didn’t think he’d fall for it, but I had to try. “Come on, you remember me. I’m Kihrin. We met right here in Atrine when you asked us to go take that message to King Kelanis. I get it, I do. After all, I know you all say I was S’arric in a past life…”

Ompher made a throwing gesture with his left hand, and something streaked toward me, too fast for me to dodge. I didn’t need to dodge: a boulder roughly the size and weight of five or six men flew through the space that I technically occupied. It sailed right through as though nothing was there. Because nothing was there. Then it crashed into the ground fifty feet away and exploded with a force that made me wince. There was no way that people hadn’t been injured from that. Odds were excellent that people had died.

Which meant Ompher wasn’t buying my story, and he didn’t care who he hurt if it meant taking me out. The boulder had passed right through me because I was just a projection. And the last thing in the universe that would fool the Guardian of Matter was an illusion that didn’t have any substance.

“Great talk, Dorna. I’ll tell Janel you said hi.” I blinked out, canceling the spell. A second later, I returned to my temporary base of operations on one of the moons.

Fuck. I wanted to scream. I could only hope that I’d so distracted Ompher that he’d ignore Dorna and spend all his energy trying to find me. But I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t be certain what Ompher would do to Dorna now that I’d left. I feared that leaving might have been a terrible mistake. All I knew was that staying would have been much worse.

Less than a heartbeat later, I realized I’d made a different sort of mistake: I’d underestimated Ompher.

He appeared in the space right beside me on the moon.

I gaped. That bastard had somehow found a way to track me. That shouldn’t have been possible. Ompher had somehow figured out how to follow my projection back to my actual body, to track that body even after I’d teleported away.

“Don’t—” was as far as I managed before Ompher was on me. Although strangely, it wasn’t anything like a normal attack. No blasts of energy, no slashes of magically sharpened artifacts, no killing spells. Instead, Ompher just reached out a hand and touched my arm.

That should have disintegrated his hand.

It didn’t.

Ompher had come prepared. He wore a strange set of gloves that Argas had probably crafted. Something no doubt designed to protect Ompher from proximity to Vol Karoth, at least for a few seconds. But those few seconds were enough.

Ompher teleported us both.

The next moment, I was back in a location I both recognized and loathed: the Korthaen Blight hadn’t grown any less horrendous or Blight-y in the short time since I’d left it. We appeared near the center, within sight of Kharas Gulgoth. A faint scent carried on the wind, dry and sulfurous, as though the Blight were trying to force its way past the barriers surrounding the city.

I had no idea why Ompher would bring me back there, except perhaps that with the morgage gone, it was one of the few places in the world where our fight risked few casualties from collateral damage. So maybe he did care about that.

Whether that was Ompher’s motivation or not, he wasted no time attacking again. This time, he used physical magic, swinging his arms as though punching me but delivering hits of pure magical energy. The blows were a thousand times harder than anything a normal man—even a normal god-king, if such a term could be used—could accomplish with muscle and bone alone.

It felt like being hit by scorpion war machine casks launched at frightening speed. I staggered back as I was struck two, three, four times. And while I absorbed a great deal of that energy, I didn’t absorb enough.

I felt bones crack.

“Good,” Ompher said. His grin held no humor, only a rictus mask of grief. “You can be hurt.”

He made a pushing motion, then; I flew backward. I should clarify that I fell backward; it was as if I’d lost my ability to hover at the same time that up, down, and sideways shuffled around. I slammed against one of the magical walls of force outlining the crumbling structures of the dead city.

I tried to push myself free and discovered that I couldn’t. The stone at my back disintegrated as a great weight pressed me into the rock sideways.

Gravity. Because Ompher wasn’t the God of Earth, never mind that he’d been given its name. Ompher was tied to “matter” in exactly the same way I was tied to “energy.”

Perhaps thinking of Ompher as the “weakest” of the surviving Guardians had been a mistake.

I concentrated on resisting Ompher’s abilities, exerting my own in response. I slid a foot forward, possibly one of the most difficult feats I’d ever accomplished, and leaned against it. Slowly, I managed to shuffle forward another half step. I then began to feed off the tenyé that Ompher needed to manipulate the gravity crushing me.

It was the first time I’d ever been grateful for my horrifying need to consume energy.

But Ompher and I weren’t done. Ompher smiled. The Guardian glanced up toward the sky with an expression I could only describe as supreme satisfaction. A second later, Ompher flew backward away from me, so quickly it would have been easy to believe that Ompher had teleported a second time.

I didn’t have time to give chase.

Because a mountain fell on my head.

To be fair, it wasn’t a real mountain. Those were difficult to rip out of the ground without drawing a lot more attention to the whole process than Ompher had generated. Never mind that Ompher would have had to keep the mountain from crumbling into a million pieces, which might have been a difficult feat even for him. No, this wasn’t even composed of rock.

This was ice and dust and probably non-terrestrial. If I had to guess, Ompher, master of gravity and mass, had just smashed a comet directly into the Korthaen Blight. Or more specifically, had just smashed a comet into me.

So what did I do in response to being hit by a massive object moving that fast?

What anyone would have done.

I died.