Stormchild: Emeline and the Forest Mage

43 Guiselia's Cave

        'Avétk?'

        His hand gripped her shoulder, and when she turned to see his face, imperfect as it was, her heart skipped a beat and joy filled her. A tear threatened to drip from her eye, but she blinked it away and smiled with tight lips. 'It's so good to see you.'

        For a brief moment she saw the warmth she had come to love in his gaze, and then it was gone, and Avétk bowed his head. 'I am ever at your service, Child of the Prophecy.' He knelt at her side, but his eyes remained on the floor. 'Forgive me for failing to protect you, as is my duty and honour. I—' His voice broke. 'I've failed you.'

        What was this? She wanted to lift his chin, but something inside her stopped her, a voice saying that no sworn warrior would have his chin tilted up by a child, and that she, as the Child of the Prophecy, shouldn't have been finding excuses for him anyway. His proclamation echoed and fell into a long silence, and Emeline looked around at the others.

        Ketiya, a knife in her one hand, an apple in the other, sitting cross-legged on a sturdy wooden table pushed against the far wall of what she now thought to be some kind of cave. Farin, frozen in mid-conversation with the hooded Apprentice who looked like an incarnation of death with the black cloak's hood hiding her face, seated near to an enormous black cook pot simmering over a fire against the wall behind her. The pot was so big they could probably chop up Giants and boil them for supper in it. Emeline's overactive imagination supplied her the images of huge, bloody chunks of human flesh dropped into boiling water. Ugh. And to the other side of the pot knelt a woman, old—perhaps as old as the Forest Mage, her grey hair frazzled, just past shoulder length, and her clothing stranger than any Emeline had ever seen.

        Her mouth dropped open, but the woman smiled at her. 'You awaken at last.'

        This was her, the voice that had chanted her to healing, the rough and tender voice of a woman with wisdom deeper than a well, but wisdom bought with loss and suffering, for there was that hint of ache to her speech. From a shadow which Emeline thought might be a way out of the cave, the Mage walked, his dark green robe as regal as ever, accompanied by another stranger. Probably the strangest of all, because he looked just like the Mage except that his skin was more leathery, and his clothing was brown and old just like the floppy hat he wore. They seemed to share a comradery; it was in the way they walked, with a similar gait, and the way their smiles tilted when their eyes met as they neared her.

        'Holy Fathers, child,' the Mage exclaimed, 'at last you return to us! This—' he patted the man in the hat's shoulder, '—is Finlug, my brother.'

        Her mouth hung open. 'B-brother. Huh.'

        The Mage smiled affably and patted his brother's shoulder, but then the friendliness left his face and he knelt at her side. 'We have little time left, and we have travelled far and sacrificed much...' He looked past her, at the beam of light cutting at a slant from the roof down to a pillar on which lay something she immediately knew was more valuable than the crowns of all the kingdoms together. A book.

        'Guiseila,' the Mage said looking at the strangely garbed woman, 'is she ready? Can we do this now?'

        The woman smacked her wrinkled lips, her palms rested on her knees. 'We have no choice, we must do it now. Each moment the Darkness grows and our chances weaken.' Her neck cracked as she suddenly looked up, past the beam of light, her eyes swirling just like the Warden's had. 'Cannot you sense it gathering, amassing like that reddest day when the North bled? Even now the Ysberg kneels to her whims and a new red river cuts down its side like the tears of a mother's loss.' Guiseila's voice took on a ghostly tone, sounding eerie in the echoing cavern with its grating, aged rasp. 'Die tyd kom, en is nou, dat die profesie se gebeurtenisse begin, en die eerste van vier deure oopgebreek is. Die Meisie Kind verrys van die as van haar gelede en breek die deur van vergetenis.' The storm left her eyes, and she blinked twice while everyone stared at her.