Edited 1/29/22 - Please let me know your thoughts throughout the story, I'd love to hear for you :)
I do not own the Inheritance Cycle.
Enjoy,
The Vantage Point
It was a morning of dripping fog, presaging an early spring, when they rode out of Teirm. The horses snorted unhappily, skittered over the hard ground and spattering the puddles, churning them to mud. Rose watched, in a dull tedium, as day began to dawn into clear skies in which rode huge clouds, silver and grey beneath the white and gold above. The air held a dampness to it, and she could feel its moisture sticking to her clothing and hair. Ahead of her was Ailis and Tornac, both of them walked swiftly beside their horses, up a steep hill winding the scattered streets and alleys.
Rose and Tornac arrived in Teirm the early evening the day before just as the sun began descend behind the high walls. A pair of guards, who stood permanently by the gate, had demanded identification and then, in almost an apathetic fashion, one of them waved them in. They had walked for a ways, through the streets until they reached the Croaking Toad, a dark but cheerful inn with a lovely tavern attached to it, where they later had met with Ailis.
While Tornac and Rose had traveled to Teirm, Ailis had restocked their supplies, these now weighed down heavily on the horses. Starshine's damaged hoof, which had been cleaned and wrapped each night before Rose and Tornac arrived, had festered and the bandages had tattered, covered with filth, and the moment Ailis saw it she had healed it with magic. The horse was now in decent form, his hoof completely healed over, but the task had put Ailis in a foul mood. Moments after this, they had eaten a meal together in their rooms and the woman told them of the news she had heard, most of it boded ill for the region and none of it held the slightest rumor of Thorn, this was something Ailis had listened out for. Also they had talked through their plans at the inn.
"I have told you this before," Ailis had said glancing to Rose, "that many of the ships headed south have been lost to the seas, and numbers of merchants are no longer shipping overseas. This don't help us any as I was planning on us being able to board one of these ship."
"Has anyone the faintest idea on who might be responsible for this?" said Tornac, leaning back in this chair. "It sounds like the dealings of pirates, if you ask me."
Ailis shook her head. "I don't think so. That's what is baffling the people, the merchants being hurt by this are the same people over and again. What's stranger still is that there seems to be a pattern to it."
Tornac nodded his head thoughtfully. "I suppose that we shall have to continue our voyage over land, then, yes? Kuasta is not a possibility at all?"
Ailis looked up quickly, shaking her head. "It is," she had said, "but if these dealings are happening here in Teirm I have no doubt the same is occurring in Kuasta as well. I would rather dislike it to travel all the way there just to find out that we shall have to return north to through the mountain pass."
Rose, who was on the verge of sleep, stirred at this. "There are other passes through the Spine," she said tiredly.
"And all of them are exceedingly perilous at the best of times, and these are not the best of times," said Ailis, moving around the beans on her plate with disinterest. "I'm not willing to take the risk of traveling through them."
Nodding, Rose subsided and continued to listen. She didn't like this thought, of routing back through the pass and traveling east of the mountains once again. It seemed to her, that this proposal could change the moment they reached the pass as many of Ailis plans did, but the woman had a demined look about her and Rose knew that her mind was set.
"No road is without risk," Tornac said grimly. "We can go and investigate Kuasta, and hope that the attacks have not affected their ports. If word has gotten out about our companion the Empire would not expect us to travel south, even if they've track him and Rose as far as here. They will expect us to be fleeing them, and I think there has been hearsay though you have not heard it."
"No," Ailis said avidly, her face darkening. "I think this is our best gamble. We have no choice."
She acted as if she was wanting to say more but did not, instead spreading out a map in the table, holding down the curling parchment with her hands. Tornac, who shook his head but argued no further, pored over it as well. Ailis wanted to ride as quickly as possible to the mountain pass, running along the Toark River which pierced the Spine, which would bring them back out to the eastern country. After that, she planned to go south keeping strictly to the roads and afterwards she would not say.
That following day, they awoke before the sun, while it was still night, and prepared themselves. As they turned down the road, Rose looked behind at Teirm for the last time allowing the sight to etch itself into her memory. Teirm had been first built many hundreds years before around cliffs that trust up more than a hundred feet, before gently swooping down to a on a low pinnacle of rock on which the city stood like colossal stalks of quartz. The city of Teirm did in truth rise up on a giant tor that stretched cliff to cliff, it was on this incline that the city was built. On one side the city scoped down and stopped at the harbor, a small inlet with a narrow mouth, bordering on the city side by a wide stone quay, and on the other it inclined more gently down to the plains of the east.
The original buildings of the grand city of Teirm were now little more than ashes and broken shambles, hidden deep beneath the cobbled streets. Over the many years that had passed, the city had been rebuilt from savage fires and treasure-seeking brigands and ruthless Urgals and rushing floods, until the city earliest arrangement and name was long forgotten, and over its wreckage stood Teirm. The buildings of Teirm rose high in its center where the city's garrison lived, companies of stern warriors numbering in the hundreds, and low at its edges, a design constructed on defense with very little thought of leisure. Even in the days of the Riders, when Teirm had long fallen from its greatness, it was proud and strong.
For the rest of the day, they rode through the coastal region, through town and hamlet and past lone farmhouses. Some places were as devastated as those in the south, abandoned with shutters swinging drunkenly in the breeze, while others seemed completely unaffected. Eventually, the mountains seemed to emerge from their swathe of distance all at once, as the leagues of hazy air had held them at bay, making them mere pictures and not real things at all. From the foots of the mountains, riding eastward along the Toark, it was as if the eye could not take in such vastness. From here Rose could see only the lesser peaks, and even they looked grim and forbidding. But despite this, over everything was a pall. The sky remained grimly overcast then, late in the afternoon, it began to drizzle. Only when the light became too hard to see did they make camp under the shelter of granite overhang covered with curling moss and white tailed grasses.
"Have I ever told of you of the heavenly dancers?" Tornac asked, dishing out the barley stew, in a strange tone.
Rose nodded guardedly. "Yes," she said. "A good number of times."
As a child she had heard of the tale many times, though then it was told to bore her into slumber. A tragic tale; it was of two lovers who met, and wended their way to the dungeons of a foul-hearted king, and there they died beyond hope or help of the gods. Their spirits live however, and in the north, a place at the setting sun's right hand, that lies on either side of life, sometimes a curtain of light fills the skies as the borders of life and death become less certain, and the lovers are able to guide, in voices like the star, those in peril away from a fate such as theirs.
"I believe this night to one of them," he said. "I can hear it, like a strange music from the stars."
"There is no sound," said Rose worriedly glancing at Tornac. "There is no music from the voices of the stars."
Ailis huffed unhappily. "If there is then I have yet to hear it, Tornac, and I can't say that I'm not glad I have not."
"Because you cannot hear them does not mean that they are not there," he said.
Rose shifted uncomfortably. "It is only a tale, Tornac. You shouldn't take it such sincerity."
"There is a truth in tales," said Tornac looking on humoredly. "Small truths nevertheless earnest ones. For that reason, some people fear fables and others yearn for them. The truth is a lockless door, one can try to latch it shut but it will always open, somehow."
She looked at him in confusion for a moment, and then noticed that he was not looking in her direction but instead at Ailis. The woman stilled under his gaze, then moved to set her bowl aside. There was a silence then, in which the chirping of crickets and croaking of frogs and hooting of night birds sounded, for a time that was all that was heard.
"This will be the last of the rain for a time," said Ailis, leaning back on her hands, changing the discussion. "At least I hope so. It would be nice to strike good weather for the next few days."
"Yes, it would," said Tornac tiredly.
Ailis wiggled her feet. "Nicer still, to go through the Pass without anything bad happening."
They were silent, again, for a time, and Rose listened to the fire snapping and an owl call out into the night, and far off a dog's feral howling. A little moonlight, that escaped the blanketing of clouds, glimmered greyly onto Thorn's scales who lay at the edge of the overhang. He moved in his sleep, his tail flickering restlessly, and made a humming noise but he otherwise still.
Not long after they finished eating did Rose feel a wave of exhaustion sweep over her, and she bid everyone a good night. She scrambled down to the bottom of the hallow and lay down, looking at the roof of stone over her. After a while she sank into a restless sleep trouble by vague, disquieted dreams.
They broke their fast the next day in the grey light before dawn, barely able to see each other through a thick fog that had descended in the dark hours, and entered the pass soon afterward. It was darker there, in that forested pass, and Rose felt its darkness press around her. Since the night before, Ailis acted notably colder towards Tornac, rebuffing his attempts at conversation, forcing them to ride through the mountains in silence. Above them flew Thorn, a dot in the vastness of the hazed sky, with whom Rose struck up a conversation, mainly to keep her mind away from the deeds that had happened here, the last time they traveled through, and all that preceded it.
The track was heavily strewn with rotting leaves, which dampened the sound of their hoof beats, and was punctuated by stone fords from the many streams that crossed it. As the day drew on Rose began to feel oppressed by the silence, and she and Thorn spoke less and less frequently. She thought often of the thieves and the exchange the night before, but by the time the afternoon came she had forcibly pushed it from her mind and listened instead to the birdsong. She saw no living thing, the birds remained hidden in the branches, but once she thought she saw the red form of a deer disappearing, swift as wind, between the trees but it was so brief it could have been a trick of the eye; otherwise she saw no living thing.
When they drew close to Ludène, late that afternoon, they skittered around it altogether. Rose watched the buildings rise from the wood, partly veiled by masses of leaves, and listened to the chitchat of people, and among the people, she saw glimpses of the smart red tunics of soldiers, their voices rising above the crowd. Ailis who had looked grim before, scowled even deeper and hastened their pace.
Impelled by an increasing sense of urgency, they pushed their horses hard and soon reached the edge of the plateau. Here the land tipped precipitously down and the going was slower; they had to pick their way carefully along steep, narrow tracks winding through the tingles of prickling juniper and bristly stems of fiddleneck and leafy packs of amaranthus that grew grandly around bleakly speckled granite and mazes of small, noisy streams. Rose squinted up at the obelisks of stone, fragments of somber sky between, sometimes she would see Thorn flying there, zigzagging in and out of the columns. She was suspended between delight at the astounding vistas that sometimes opened up before her and a constant anxiety about the dizzying depths and heights that seemed to wait only a few steps from her feet. After a while, the woodland seemed to have thinned slightly and the road broadened, and so they mounted and cautiously pressed on.
Then Ailis stopped suddenly, and Starshine nearly ran into Arvid's rump. Rose turned, her mouth open to a comment, her face cross, and saw a sudden flash and the sound of a whirling of many bees that came from above and before them, then the thawks as the bolts hit home. Tornac shuddered from the impact, an evil-looking arrow was protruding from just below this collarbone. It had passed right through his back. Shadowless reared nervously, shaking his head, then screamed as he too was struck. For a short moment Tornac clung to his back, like a thistle, and then toppled sideways from the saddle.
A wordless scream reverberated in the small canyon, and it took her an instant to recognize that it came from her. Forgetting everything else, Rose spurred the horse around and dove off of the saddle, and in that moment Tornac lifted his head and opened his eyes and looked up into her face. His eyes were very blue and clear, and his face very pale, the scar around his eye suddenly vivid. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but produced only a bubbling of blood. There was no chance Tornac could be saved, she understood with an agony as clear and sharp as a flesh wound, as his head dropped and he stilled.
Something brushed against her mind, and this jolted her from her dumbfounded state. Rose, you have to move this instant, Ailis said into her mind. And then when she noticed that Rose hadn't moved she sent a bolt that nearly knocked Rose over. Now!
Rose shook her head in confusion, but had no time to think as a wave of black tipped arrows shot down from the peaks. She instinctively ran from the bolts, to her horse, and desperately scrambled onto his back. Rose heard the screams of the horses, a panicked sound like splitting rock, and just hung on as Starshine plunged forward, Arvid stretching ahead. The horses' ears were flat against their skulls, their tails stuck between their legs. She looked up, pushing her hair out of her eyes, her chest heaving in great sobs of breath, and with a sick horror saw a gang of men jumping down from the rocks, and arrows still raining down in great falls, these were somehow weaving around them, as if redirected by some giant shield. Starshine spun himself around the sharp bend, making Rose's neck crack with the violence of the turn, and tore down the road bolting for his life.
A/N: I cannot begin to tell you how much I did not what to write this chapter, I've delayed and delayed and came up with reason after reason so that I would not have to write this- but I knew it could not delayed any longer. There were points that I wanted to hit before this chapter was written, and I did. It was time. So, it was my intention, to kill Tornac, before I even began to write this story. But I didn't want to because Tornac is probably my favorite character... but his death is not meaningless, there is a reason for it.
Anyhow, there are two more things that I have to say. First, I will not put the side stories on a separate/new story, they are a part of Lirouratr and therefore will continue, though not as often. If you don't like them, don't read them. Second, if you want to know what happened to Dunion before and after chapter 22, I posted a separate story called "North." When my brother and I came up with him and his family we came up a whole story for him, something I couldn't resist writing.
If you could, please review.
