Bladesinger - Keith Francis Strohm [107]
And everything became light.
* * * * *
The concussive force of the blast knocked Taen to the ground, tossing him like a paper doll in a raging storm. He lay there stunned for a few moments as his sight cleared. Desperately he cast around for some sign that Marissa had survived the explosion. The alcove where she had stood lay buried beneath layers of thick stone and rubble.
She was gone again.
He had failed Marissa once more-just like he had on the bridge. If he hadn't hesitated at the last moment, Marissa would still be alive. Despair and self-hatred rose up in him, like old friends who had departed for a long journey and returned. They accused him, called him a wretched failure and a murderer, demanded that he run away and hide in the darkness of his inadequacy.
This time, however, Taen didn't listen.
Though the faces of Talaedra and Marissa, frozen in dying, swept across his vision, the half-elf refused to despair. Both women may indeed have loved him far more than he deserved, but they both saw within him the person that he could become. He would honor them and spend the remainder of his life becoming that person. It did not spare him his grief-that cut like a vorpal blade through his heart-but it was a clean wound, without rancor or disease.
He would have wept, but a vision of the withered crone stumbling to her feet drove all sadness from him.
"Did… did you think you could defeat me?" she spat, blood-matted hair tossed wildly around her head. "I am beyond your power even now."
Taen pushed himself painfully to his feet, though the crone's spell had wounded him badly. Suppurated flesh tore from his skin and arms as he rose, grasping his father's sword. He concentrated for a moment, held the sword aloft-and suddenly the Song sprang to life, as deep and resonant as it had in the moments before the witch's foul spell had struck.
Borovazk and Roberc stood to his left, hacking at what remained of the vrock, who had collapsed beneath the Staff of the Red Tree's final blast. There, in the flickering torchlight, in a mountain cavern locked away from the rest of the world, Taen stood with his sword raised-beyond anger, beyond grief, beyond any emotion that had distracted him throughout the long years of his half-elf life-and he Sang. Slowly, painfully, he opened himself totally to the Song. If it desired his whole life, then he would offer it gladly, as Marissa had done for him and the lives of his friends. Without another thought, the half-elf surrendered, fell down a hole so dark and deep it might well have gone on forever. There was nothing in that hole-no thought, no sense of self-only thick, unrelenting darkness.
When he emerged, it was as if he had fallen into another universe. Power flared around him and through him, lived in each measure of the Song's flow-which was also each beat of his own heart. There was no "Taen" separate from the Song and no part of the Song that was not somehow a part of him. His father's blade sensed the change as well, for it burned with an intense argent light, filling the cavern with its own power.
"You are finished!" Taen shouted at the chanting witch. "By the will of the wychlaran and the blood of my father, it is over."
The half-elf raised his sword and moved to attack.
He gathered his arcane power, but rather than cast a formulaic spell as he had done for most of his life, Taen channeled that energy, used it to speed his limbs. The world slowed around him as he gathered speed.
The crone backed away slightly to her left and shouted, "Die, you fool!" as she brought her ruined eye to bear upon him. A black beam of power shot out once again, but this time Taen leaped to the side, avoiding it. A section of the cavern floor sizzled and popped for a moment before completely disintegrating before his eyes.
Another beam lanced out at him, but this time Taen tumbled behind a long-toothed stalagmite that took the brunt of the attack. Without hesitation, the half-elf sent arcane energy surging through his sword; bolts of force leaped from the blade's tip to strike the crone. She shrieked