Chaos God 6, page 9
part #6 of Chaos God Series
“It’s neither,” I laughed. “Humans have plenty of reasons to hate one another.”
We talked for a long time about all the things Lyrie was curious about, and one of her favorite things was when I tried to describe the different animals of Earth. Flamingos were especially hard to describe and make her believe they were real creatures.
“That sounds absurd!” Lyrie giggled.
“No, I swear!” I laughed. “They’re huge birds, and they’re bright pink!”
“I cannot imagine such a creature.” Lyrie grinned brightly, and her whole face glowed with the warmth I felt flowing between us.
Then Emneth walked up and cleared her throat apologetically.
“I hate to interrupt,” the red-eyed elf murmured. “But it is time.”
“Levi,” Lyrie said my name with more confidence in her voice. “Would you like to help us to disassemble the altar?”
“I don’t think I would be much help,” I said in a hesitant voice. “I’d be interested in watching, though.”
“We need as many magic users as possible,” Lyrie explained. “Emneth will lead us in pulling the altar’s power into us while we prepare the stones for a state of rest.”
“What? Really?” I asked, and I looked at Emneth for approval. “Can I?”
“Hmm,” Emneth hummed, and she tapped a finger on her chin. “I see no reason you would be a hindrance to the process, and your magic is very strong. In fact, you may be a great help. I would be honored to have you join us, King Levi.”
I grinned at that as I stood up, and I found that my ass was a little numb from sitting on the stone seat for such an extended period of time. A rough massage with my hands brought feeling back to my butt, and I gestured for the dark elves to lead me.
Lyrie and Emneth led me around the fire pit to the gray stone altar on the other side, and several other dark elves were coming out of the homes to join us. I recognized the red eyes and kind face of Pilla, but I didn’t see her young daughter or partner, Kine, anywhere. I remembered that Kine was an archer with no magical ability, so it made sense if he’d already gone with their daughter to the temporary camp, but I couldn’t figure out why Pilla wouldn’t have gone with them.
Unless…
“Does Pilla have magic?” I asked Lyrie in a subdued voice.
“She does.” Lyrie nodded and glanced at the pleasantly plump elf. “Her magic is very specific. She can assist plants in growing, and since the ice and snow have destroyed all the crops, she has been quite solemn. Pilla insisted on staying in the village to assist with the altars to make up for her lack of contributions these last weeks.”
“That was very noble of her,” I said, and I caught the mother staring at me and Lyrie, so I gave her a friendly smile. “I assume Kine and their daughter left already?”
“Yes,” Lyrie confirmed. “Pilla insisted upon that as well. Kine did not wish to leave his love behind, but she convinced him their child’s safety was far more urgent.”
“She was right,” I said, and I thought about the impending birth of my first child.
“Form a circle,” Emneth instructed the group. “To mirror the full moon that gives us strength in these trying times.”
The gathered elves stepped forward and formed an even circle around the stone altar, and they held their palms facing toward the center. They were close enough that they could have reached out and touched, but far enough apart that I could have walked between them easily enough. I positioned myself similarly between Lyrie and Emneth, and I turned my palms out to match them.
“Clear your minds,” Emneth guided, and she took a deep breath. “Turn your eyes to Máni.”
I glanced quickly around at the dark elves to make sure I was doing it right, and then I lifted my face toward the light of the moon. It was bright but nowhere near as blinding as the midday sun.
Emneth hummed deep in her throat. She started low and slowly raised her voice through at least three octaves like she was a Broadway Star preparing her vocal cords. The rest of the villagers followed her lead, and I did my best to join in.
“Máni, we call upon your power,” Emneth declared in a crisp and clear voice that reminded me of the clarity of a frozen lake.
Then she began to chant something in a language I didn’t understand. The words were guttural and filled with harsh consonant sounds, and not as many vowels as I thought real words needed. I forced my eyes to remain on the moon above us like I’d been told, but that became harder when the dark elves began to add their own voices to Emneth’s chant.
I broke my stare for a fraction of a second and looked around to find all the dark elves were raising their arms slowly toward the moon. They looked like they were ready to catch something, as if they expected physical objects to fall down from the sky.
“King Levi,” Lyrie hissed beside me. “You must join us, or you must leave the circle.”
My heart jumped into my throat at the serious expression on Lyrie’s face, and I could tell she wasn’t fucking around. With haste, I turned my eyes back to the bright surface of the moon, and I raised my arms to match the dark elves. I tuned my ears to Emneth’s voice, and I told myself to stop trying to make sense of the words.
Instead, I focused on the sounds themselves, and I began to repeat the guttural, clunking syllables of the chant. I felt a little silly as I shaped the nonsense sounds, but I was intrigued, nonetheless. I’d seen enough during my time on this strange planet to know magic was a real and tangible thing, so I continued to hold my arms up toward the moon.
Then a strong current of magical energy slid into my fingertips, down my forearms, through my biceps, and into my chest. It was warm like a pleasant bath at first, but the heat quickly rose to a scorching temperature in my eyes and sinuses.
The magic took hold of my body like an electric current, and I couldn’t have moved my limbs even if I’d wanted to. I imagined this is what the scenes in any X-Men movie or show felt like when Magneto controlled every bit of Adamantium on Wolverine’s skeleton.
I sucked in a sharp breath through my teeth as the heat condensed behind my eyes, and the same pounding migraine I’d experienced this morning returned with a vengeance.
My teeth clamped so hard together that I worried they would crack from the pressure, and my vision was completely obscured as my eyes began to roll back in my skull.
“Uuuuh.” I felt the groan escape from my throat more than heard it as the buzzing heat and magic filled my ears.
It felt like my entire body was going to explode into radioactive light, and I thought I might explode like the infamous Chernobyl nuclear reactors. The pressure inside my brain felt like a reverse black hole, and I didn’t know how my brain wasn’t splattered all over the faces of every dark elf in the circle.
The ground seemed to disappear beneath my feet, too, and I couldn’t tell if I’d lost sensation from the cold or if I was floating off the ground.
Nothing felt real, and every cell in my body screamed with burning hot pain.
The whole experience was less than two seconds long, and then it was over in a rush. The pain, the heat, the sensation of floating, they all instantly vanished, and I was just standing in a circle with my arms raised above my head.
A rush of cold poured over my body, and the pins and needles feeling of jumping into the Atlantic ocean in April covered my body. A brutal shiver raced down my spine, and my teeth clattered together for a second as I adjusted to the absence of the heat from a moment before.
It felt like the cold wouldn’t leave my bones until we left this village, and yet the air didn’t feel any colder than it had a few minutes before.
My vision was slowest to return, and after a brief bright flash of green light, the dark elves stood in front of me around the stone altar.
Emneth smiled all around the group, but I couldn’t focus on anything except the memory of what had just happened.
But it felt like trying to hold onto handfuls of sand, and the sensations that had been so powerfully consuming faded away without a trace.
“Well done,” Emneth praised in a satisfied tone.
I forced my eyes to focus on the dark elves’ faces in the circle around me, and they all looked pleased with what had happened. Lyrie had a relieved smile on her dark face, and Emneth’s shoulders sagged with exhaustion.
“We did it,” the short-haired elf announced, and she turned to me. “Thank you for your help, King Levi.”
“Uh,” I muttered, and my voice was barely a sound. I cleared my throat and tried again. “You’re welcome. That was… an experience.”
“Are you well?” Emneth asked, and she narrowed her red eyes at me like she could see the strain of what had occurred.
“Yeah,” I said, and I realized it was truer than I would have expected. “I’m good.”
The memory of the pain and heat was fading, and it was quickly turning fuzzy around the edges like a bad dream I couldn’t quite remember once I was awake.
That’s when I noticed the large glass sphere Emneth was now holding. It looked just like the bluish orbs of light that illuminated the houses and alleys of the dark elves’ village. Except it was the size of a basketball, and it glowed with white light.
“What is that?” I breathed as I stared at the bright ball of light.
My eyes started to water from the intensity of the light, and I had to look away even though it seemed to call to me like a siren.
“This orb will contain the magic from the altar,” Emneth explained. “It will protect the magic until we can reassemble the stones and infuse the power back into them in their new home.”
“It’s… beautiful,” I breathed.
“It is quite lovely,” Emneth agreed softly. “Thank you for your help, King Levi. We are finished for the night. We will load these stones into the cart in the morning. I suggest you get some sleep now.”
“Uh… right.” I nodded as I realized how exhausted I was.
It had been a long day, but I’d felt pretty good before we’d started the ceremony. Now, I felt like I barely had enough strength to stand up. Bed sounded incredible, so I nodded goodnight to the dark elves, and I headed toward the meeting hall.
Only one small bluish orb shone with a dim light on the inside of the doors, and the room was warm from the low fire in the hearth and the two dozen sleeping bodies spread out over the floor. It was easy enough to pick out Elora and Freesia’s sleeping forms by the brightness of their hair, and the distinctive shape of Elora’s Valkyrie wings beside her blankets.
There was a perfectly me-sized spot right between Elora and Freesia, and I stepped carefully over my sleeping ladies to settle in the middle. They’d folded an extra blanket into a makeshift pillow for me, and I scrunched it a few times to get comfortable.
After how tired I felt, I expected to fall asleep quickly and easily, but my mind was suddenly wide awake.
That had been a crazy experience, and if I focused on my eyes, I could remember that I’d felt pain and heat. There still wasn’t any lingering ache or sensation of the pain or pressure, but my mind knew it had happened.
If I wasn’t so confident in my own sanity, I might have thought I was gaslighting myself into thinking the whole thing had been boring. Then I thought back to this morning, and the forceful rush of pressure inside my brain.
That had happened once before. I knew it had.
The night Sylmarie had finally agreed to live in the castle with us. I’d been sitting in the dining hall after she’d gone to settle into her new room, and a feeling of pressure in my head had consumed me for a moment. It had felt like something was trying to break out of my skull by sheer force.
“What the fuck?” I mouthed silently to keep from waking my ladies and the others in the meeting hall.
Whatever was happening wasn’t an isolated event, and I could only assume the influx of magic from the altar had triggered the event. I laid awake for a while after that trying to come up with some common denominator between the other two instances, but I couldn’t figure out anything concrete. There were a lot of things that matched between the two events.
I’d been in the castle. I’d been alone both times. They’d happened around the same time as other big changes in my world.
But none of those things explained it. I’d spent a lot of time in the castle, and a lot of that time had been spent alone. I’d experienced enormous changes almost nonstop since arriving on this planet, but this sensation of something trying to claw out of my brain had started more than eight months after I first stepped foot on Asgardian soil.
None of it made sense to me, and I started to get a normal headache from thinking about it. I sighed heavily as I pushed all the thoughts away, and finally, I drifted into a deep sleep.
Then I began to dream about a vast open darkness, and I was floating in the abyss like an astronaut through empty space.
It felt like an eternity passed as I was surrounded by a vacuum of sensory input. There was no sound other than the slow, steady beating of my heart, and not a single point of light existed to keep me company.
Eventually, a dim green light began to glow far off in the distance. It appeared as a single pinprick of something in the vast nothingness, and I locked onto it like a magnet. The green light was bright and vivid like clovers, and it started to grow larger. It expanded slowly at first, and then it grew at a rapidly increasing pace until it was all around me. I swam in the bright green light, and it was pleasantly warm and welcoming at first. Then the light started to retreat, and the darkness returned.
But with the darkness came pain.
It was like the green light was taking every inch of my flesh with it as it left, and I could feel every tiny rip and cut as I was torn into a million pieces.
My mouth opened wide as a silent scream ripped from my throat, and I thought the agony would surely kill me. I begged for the light to stay with me, for it to stop tearing me apart atom by atom, but it just kept fading away into darkness.
The pain was worse than anything I’d ever experienced, and I wondered how I hadn’t passed out from shock. I willed my brain to shut itself off, but I remained excruciatingly awake and aware of every small thread of my being as I was dismembered into the very building blocks of life.
The agony went on forever, and I longed for it to end.
“Levi!” Elora’s terrified voice echoed from a great distance. “Levi! Wake up!”
The ache in whatever was left of my bones tried to hold me in the depths of my dreams, but Freesia’s voice began calling to me, too.
“Levi, wake up!” my red-haired healer said, and her voice cracked with emotion.
The potential that my ladies were hurt or in danger is what finally tore my mind loose from the horrific nightmare. Finally, I felt the hard stone floor and wool blankets beneath my body, and I felt the firm hands of my lovers on my shoulders as they shook me.
I pried my eyes open to find Elora and Freesia’s faces above me, and they both looked shaken with terror.
“Levi,” Freesia sobbed, and tears fell freely down her freckled cheeks.
Chapter 7
“What?” I asked in a groggy voice that I hardly recognized. “What’s going on?”
The panicked looks on Elora and Freesia’s faces sent a dribble of adrenaline into my brain, and I sat up ready to kill whatever had made them look so afraid.
“Is it the frost giants?” I demanded.
“No, Levi,” Elora said with a nervous shake of her head. “It was you.”
“What?” I asked with disbelief. “What do you mean?”
“You were groaning in your sleep,” Freesia muttered as she swiped at the tears on her face. “You were tense and groaning like you were in pain.”
“We’ve been trying to wake you for a long time,” Elora added. “You wouldn’t wake up. It was like you were stuck…”
“Oh,” I breathed as the excruciating pain of my dream came back to me. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to scare you. I was… I’m fine. I was having a really intense dream.”
“I was so relieved when you opened those beautiful blue eyes of yours,” Freesia said, and her voice caught in her throat.
“I’m alright, really,” I said in the most reassuring voice I could muster. “I promise. I’m fine.”
Elora’s silvery eyebrows furrowed together as Freesia bit down on her bottom lip, and I could see they were still worried. They nodded at me, but neither of them moved away from my sides.
I started to push myself to stand up, and I realized my head was still pounding. The pressure that felt like there was something inside my skull along with my brain was back, and it throbbed like a breathing creature trying to take over my mind.
“You should eat something,” Freesia decided, and she put on her determined face.
She was going to get past her anxiety about the situation by doing everything she could to take care of me, and if that meant a good, hearty breakfast, I was going to let her.
“Yeah, food sounds good,” I said, and I stood up as slowly as I could without drawing more attention to myself.
The pressure and ache were already starting to ease, and I suspected it would fade away to nothing in a moment like it had the last few times. I looked around and found the meeting hall empty aside from my ladies and me, and we put on our outer layers to go out into the cold.
Elora and Freesia both watched me closely, and the worry around their eyes started to ease as I felt more and more like myself. By the time we were walking toward the door, I was back to normal, and they seemed relieved by my state.
As soon as we stepped outside, a brutally cold wind whipped through the village, and the sting of the icy air across my cheeks set me on guard.
“Oh, no…” Freesia mumbled.
“Is that…?” Elora asked.
We all turned north without hesitation as another brutal wind blasted through the village, and a third came right after it.
“Looks like we’ve got company,” I growled, and I looked at my ladies with urgency in my eyes. “Go!”
The three of us bolted toward the town center, and I was only slightly relieved to see the majority of the dark elves gathered around the fire pit with my warriors. They were in the middle of eating breakfast while Emneth led a small team that included Ivaran and Lyrie in loading the last stones from the central altar onto the cart.
