Phoenix Unbound (Page 83)
It was an unearthly sound, vast and piercing. Another followed, and every man and woman around Azarion gasped and covered their ears. The horses went berserk, many of them throwing their riders before bolting away, either into the forests or to the rolling hills behind the Savatar encampment.
Azarion instinctively raised his arms to cover his face as a colossal whirlwind of fire suddenly blasted up from the center of the city on an invisible concussion wave of pressure that made his ears pop. The air around him sucked in toward the city, bowing nearby trees, before exploding outward, shattering the city’s outer barbican walls.
The damage the catapults did was nothing compared to the catastrophic destruction of masonry debris and wood shrapnel flying through the air. The Kraelian formations collapsed, obliterated by a howling gale that hurled them about like leaves in an autumn storm.
The monstrous column of fire expanded, and within the gaps of the broken walls, Azarion saw people running and screaming as they fled before the onslaught of what was surely holy retribution.
This fire moved with purpose. Fast, destructive, it devoured everything before it as it spun through the city, leaving conflagrations in its wake. Kraelian soldiers still alive and mobile ran into the wood or vainly sought to capture horses racing past them. The Savatar fled the field as well, their mares stretched low to the ground as they strove to outrun whatever monstrosity had just erupted from the center of Kraelag and turned it into fiery rubble.
When his horse fought him hard enough to nearly buck him off its back, Azarion dismounted and jogged farther down the slope leading to the deserted battlefield, ignoring the warning cries of his people behind him. His frantic gaze swept the path his sister and the other Savatar had taken, praying they hadn’t yet made it to the city when it literally exploded before everyone’s eyes.
The heat radiating off the burning city kept him from drawing closer. Every tree, bush, and weed nearest Kraelag’s periphery had been reduced to blazing silhouettes.
Flames spiraled out of the moving whirlwind, hideous and graceful. Azarion squinted against the heat and light as the last of the Savatar archers raced past him for the uncertain safety of the camp.
That vortex of fire drew Azarion closer, despite the burn and the pain of blisters erupting on his exposed skin. A face coalesced in those flames, beautiful and terrible to behold. That face collapsed into the conflagration only to re-form once more, this time with a different woman’s visage. It did it over and over again as the twisting maelstrom turned Kraelag into an inferno.
A chorus of voices rose behind him, and he turned to hear what they said. Savatar lined the slope, calling out to the whirlwind.
“Agna! Agna!”
Azarion pivoted back to stare at the bright, destroying beacon with its many changing faces. The Great Mare, creator of all the Savatar, the goddess of fire. She had manifested before Kraelian and Savatar alike and changed the world in the span of an indrawn breath.
His wonder changed to horror. He knew now why Gilene stayed. Only an agacin could call down the fire goddess. What had she done to capture the attention of a deity? What had she sacrificed?
He shouted her name, but the hot wind barreling off Kraelag shredded the sound. He called out again and again until he was hoarse and tasted blood at the back of his throat.
The spiraling column halted in front of the remains of the city gates. Behind him, every Savatar dropped to their knees in supplication.
“Gilene,” he said in an almost soundless whisper, and this time, the goddess heard him.
A sliver of fire separated itself from the main column and floated across the littered battlefield to where Azarion knelt in the drying mud. He stayed on his knees, mesmerized. The entity stopped a short distance from him, close enough that he felt the heat it generated but not so close that he would burn from its proximity.
The splinter changed, taking on the face and form of a woman, and Azarion groaned at the sight.
Gilene, made of flame now instead of flesh, stared at him with eyes the color of luminous gold coins. She raised a hand, outlining his form in a loving caress that sent ripples of heat over the grass to buffet his face and arms.
Grief threatened to suffocate him. He’d found her again, but she was forever lost to him now. No longer a handmaiden of Agna but part of the goddess herself.
“Gilene,” he said once again, and this time it was a prayer more than a name.
Her smile, wistful and sad, danced across her mouth. “I can say it now,” she said in a voice that crackled like burning wood in a hearth. “I won’t falter.” Again her hand caressed the air in front of him. “I love you, gladiator. Always.” She floated back a little, leaving a scorch mark in the dirt. He reached for her, and she darted back even farther. “Farewell.”
He leapt to his feet, reason scattered as he lunged to capture her, only to embrace empty air. She drifted away again, and this time she no longer pulsed with living flame. Instead, she faded, bit by bit, until there was nothing more than a single spark that winged away and finally disappeared from sight.
As if the goddess had bided her time until her handmaiden said goodbye, the giant column of fire suddenly collapsed, cascading down to a sheet of flame that flared twice before winking out completely. It was over.
Azarion stared with dry eyes at the smoking ruins of the once great city of Kraelag and her shattered walls, her battlefield a graveyard of charred bodies.
The Savatar had won. His place as ataman of his clan was secure. He and Erakes would return home as heroes.
There was much to celebrate. And far more to grieve. He closed his eyes, remembering the agacin whom he loved and who loved him in return. “I will not falter,” he said and turned his back on the city to trudge toward the camp. He had Tamura to find, hopefully alive and unharmed.
“I will not falter,” he said once more and climbed the slope to where the Savatar awaited him, wearing expressions of awe, reverence, and pity. They parted before him, a few reaching out as if to touch him before drawing away.
“I will not falter.”
If he said it enough, he might not break.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Gilene dreamed of fire and awakened to rain. Cold droplets splashed onto her face. She blinked her eyes open to watery splashes of gray and green. The deep smell of dirt and new leaves filled her nose, and an unpleasant wetness ran the length of her body, chilling her to the bone.
She shivered and curled in on herself, gasping as every muscle screamed a protest at her movements. Rain sheeted down on her, serenaded by faraway thunder. That she was outside in the elements was obvious, but where was outside?
As her vision cleared, the gray became a stormy sky above her and the green a cluster of bushes and small trees, their leaves bedecked in jewels of rain droplets. She lay in the mud, saturated to the skin, with a lone snail sheltering under a leaf to keep her company. More shivers racked her, and she sneezed. The exhalation made her cry out, and tears of pain joined the rain sliding down her cheeks.
Her memories were hardly more than blurry images and remnants of emotion—mostly fear. Two, though, emerged clear as the water droplets decorating the surrounding foliage: Azarion kneeling at the edge of the battlefield, his face red and blistered; and the goddess he worshipped, vast and powerful, her quicksilver visage both terrifying and glorious to behold.
“Agna,” she whispered, and the thunder answered with a distant rumble.
She held up a trembling hand, surprised to see that, except for streaks of mud and a few broken fingernails, it was unchanged. Agna had been merciful to her handmaiden. Gilene had been sure when she walked into the arena alone, she would die. When she became the goddess’s avatar, that certainty hadn’t wavered. She was, after all, a frail human holding the power of a deity inside her for a brief time. That her body didn’t burst and her bones didn’t shatter from acting as Agna’s vessel was nothing short of extraordinary.