Chapter 4

  Nohr the ?

  “She’s west. Go west, Lirrin” the soft green voice whispered into his head, gentle, insistent. He listened, turning his face west, and tripping along the littered forest floor, every jarring step a new agony. His magical-self throbbed, stretched and askew in a way he’d never known.

  Or maybe this was his life; it seemed he’d always known pain.

  But she could make the pain stop. The rainbow girl.

  Yes. He had to go to her. The green one was right.

  She was west.

  Silver fog surrounded him, while foliage-filtered light came from everywhere…and nowhere. Trees rose from the sloped forest floor to bar his way. The rustling of leaves shrieked in his head in the breeze. He stumbled through an endless maze, as lost in his mind as in this hot-then-cold world of trees, death, and torment. Haunting images rose before his eyes, terror-ridden, blood-soaked, open mouths screaming their final breaths. His hands—so red—sticky with her blood. No her blood. No, theirs. All of them. So very many. So much blood.

  The sun beat on him, but he couldn't see past the fog in his mind to the sun when he lifted his face. He felt its heat. Yet he shivered in the chill.

  Dark presences drew near, a familiar cold filth he knew too well. Many of them approached.

  They wanted him. He couldn't let them have him. At all costs he couldn't let them—the friendly green said so, too.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Their darkness grated on his mind and magic, scraping raw all over again, the magical wounds inside. He turned on them, these terrible and terrifying beings that leashed him, that broke him and forced him to obedience. He fought them, burned them with his magic, even though his magical-self hurt so much he howled from it.

  Pain—physical pain—whipped his mind into brief sanity. He stared blankly at the horrified soldier before him. The man backed away, pulling the sword from his side. With a tight groan, he bent over the wound. Blood spewed from the wound to the leaves with pattering sounds. He looked up as the soldier tripped over the corpses of fellow soldiers and nearly fell.

  Anger, pain, and instinct moved him. Lifting his own blade, he fought back. The man babbled in panic something that made no sense to him. He deflected a blow and struck. The man slid limply from his knife.

  More blood on his hands. Always more blood.

  He turned away from the bodies, limped off, returning to his trek to find her.

  The tenor of his madness changed as he lurched through the forest. Images flashed in his mind, faces and feelings but only a few names. In hatred he remembered Keeoc. In terror he remembered Auzhua. In grief he remembered Yannaea, Vivia, Jillis, Jastan.

  But the names slipped away again like cottonwood-fluff on the wind, swallowed by the sickness and the pain. Purpose pushed him onward.

  That dim imperative faded as the pain grew worse, as he slipped further and deeper into the mist of misery and delirium.

  “Find her, Lirrin.”

  The green-hazed words meant little now, but guided him still, and he listened to the kind tone, craving the sound of gentleness, something he hadn’t known in so very long. He felt it once in his side too, the green presence soothing his pain, easing the sickness.

  Misted glimpses of summer forest and steep hills came to him. Brief breaks in the fog caught him off guard. Sometimes it faded for hours and he could set his feet intentionally, but he lost track of days within that nothingness.

  The slopes were gentler now. A river—he could hear it pounding like his heart.

  Eventually it all went away; the names, the faces. The frightening images he knew weren’t hallucinations, but memory mercilessly haunting him. It all went away. The only thing left was green-tinged need.

  To find her—somewhere west.