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.

The knight sat erect, slender, the form of a woman, he thought. The armor was some strange steel he’d never seen before, and its surface rippled in his vision. She held a lance, which changed into a greatsword in her hands. She dispatched demon beings in effortless, sweeping blows. The stallion reared to crush others under its front hooves. With one hand she seemed to beckon, command, the rest of the entities as they trailed reluctantly behind, as if caught in some invisible net.

Westrion’s avatar, Zachary thought. She had come, and she was saving them. Then he remembered that it was what Grandmother wanted. Grandmother intended to trap the avatar. He must warn her.

His movements, however, were sluggish as if he were mired in deep mud. He was barely able to take a single step forward. He tried to shout his warning, but she had vanished. He had blinked and she was just gone. Battle surged and he was once more aware of all those around him. They were still hacking and stabbing at demon creatures, but there were fewer now and they appeared to be drawing away.

The avatar saw that one of the living stood out from all the others. A bright flame, was he, like stellar fire. He stared back at her, and some distant memory that came from the part of her that was human sparked recognition. The flame of him warmed her. And he could see her? Not many could.

She changed her lance into a greatsword and continued on her mission to end the invasion of the dark ones, the image of the stellar fire lingering pleasantly in her mind.

•   •   •

She rode the stallion toward the entrance of the passage that led to the chamber of the Aeon Iire. An old woman concealed herself nearby, behind a rock, shielded by etherea to protect herself from the dark ones. It was plain she could not see the avatar. She was the one who had broken the iire, the avatar knew, but the star steel sword was not for touching the living, and so she rode on.

The dark ones tried to disgorge themselves from the passage into the open, but the avatar raised her shield and pushed them back. Claws scrabbled at her armor. The ones she had dragged along with her continued to resist, but they could not escape.

“You will return to the deep,” she commanded, and her sword’s blade easily cut through a clump of them. Their bodies leaked black rot and steamed in the snow.

Some retreated, others attacked. She cleaved into them, the stallion trampling those before him, and slowly they forced their way into the torchlit passage. Healing the iire and stemming the tide of the dark was the only way to halt their invasion.

More claws scraped at her. Some dripped with an acidic venom on her. Her armor shielded her, but she felt the protections of it straining. As they made their way, she left mounds of their corpses behind her.

At last they reached the chamber and she dismounted, for the chamber held some barrier to the stallion. She could not feel it, she did not know what it was, but he knew and would go no farther. Within, a group of the living stood chained together. Many others were dead. She swept away the dark ones that threatened those still alive and feasted on the corpses. She ignored the screams and sobs of the living and went to the iire. It had been cracked and twisted and torn. Great magic had been used in its mutilation.

Dark ones swarmed at the breach trying to gain freedom, but she pushed them back, commanded those she had pulled in with her to return to the hell they had crawled out of. She slew those who disobeyed; then she touched the tip of the sword to the iire.

“Steel of the stars, the fire of Belasser, heal. Be whole.”

The torn edges of the iire uncurled with fluid ease. Burred edges joined one another, melded together until the iire was once more whole and uncorrupted, and gleamed with renewed strength. She brought the protections back to life until they flowed across the steel with vigor. The dark ones howled and shrieked in frustration from their prison.

The avatar had cleansed the living realm of the dark ones, and the iire would not be easily broken again. She turned at the stallion’s sharp whinny of warning. Had she missed something?

Living, burning, constricting tendrils of magic woven into a net fell from above and trapped her.