Darkwell - Douglas Niles [116]
Robyn's face drained of color, and Tristan, equally shocked, took her hand as he tried to imagine the magnitude of this disaster. He vividly recalled the sounds of Synnoria, so beautiful that they had all but driven him mad when the Llewyrr had escorted the companions through their valley during the Darkwalker War. They had been blindfolded during the passage because the Llewyrr had assured them that to look upon the beauty of the place would cause madness.
And now Synnoria, like Myrloch Vale, had fallen prey to the cancerous spread of darkness.
"This is the legacy of the Beast, Kazgoroth," sighed Brigit softly.
"No… this is the mark of the Beast's master," Robyn answered bluntly. "But why must the most cherished places be the first ones to die?"
"Perhaps because true beauty is, by its very nature, frail," suggested Brigit.
"Beauty can be strong," argued Tavish, "but its very presence is abhorrent to the kind of evil that now confronts us. I think that is why these are the first places to fall."
"But they will not be the last, unless we prevail. We should get started on the last leg of this journey." Tristan looked at each of his companions, sharing their misery but silently urging their action.
The battlefield fell quickly out of sight as they entered the trees, once again making their way between the barren trunks of rotten oaks, hickories, and pines. Four of the sisters led the way, tromping a flattened path with their snow-shoes, followed by Tristan and his companions, with Maura, Colleen, and Brigit, marching in a single file.
They moved in nearly total silence, surrounded by the soft scraping of clumps of snow falling among the dead branches. Winter's frosting grew steadily thicker on the ground.
Gentle, low hills rolled through the forest here, but the walking was easy. After a few minutes, their world had become a place of white snow and black tree trunks. The sifting flakes clouded the air and marked the limits of their vision.
Tristan's hopes rose rapidly with the arrival of the sisters. They were the finest fighters he had ever seen, and he still felt that this conflict would be resolved, in the end, through combat. They knew the vale and were equipped for this early winter in a way that he and his companions were not.
His hopes exploded with the thunderous rumble that shook the ground at his feet. He staggered backward and fell, but not before he saw a monstrous fissure erupt in the ground before him, swallowing the four sister knights who led the party. He saw the hole tear toward him, but something strong grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him to safety.
Green and red fountains of gas erupted from the fissure, and the earth groaned as if the wound caused her physical pain. Rotten tree trunks leaned into the gap as the firmament that supported them fell away, slowly toppling into nothingness. Shrieks and cracks split the forest as other trees lost their limbs or toppled whole from the violent convulsions of the land.
Gasping and spitting to clear the traces of gas he had inhaled, Tristan looked up to see that it was Yak who had saved his life. He stood and stared, horrified, at the crevasse that had claimed the lives of four of the sisters. They hadn't had a chance!
The whirling snow settled around them, and at last they could see. But the confirmation of their eyes only deepened their sadness and heightened their sense of despair.
They faced an apparently bottomless fissure, more than a hundred feet wide. It stretched to the limits of sight to the left and to the right. In short, there appeared to be no way around it.
* * * * *
The Darkwell bubbled and gurgled, pouring forth black smoke and thick, poisonous gases. Bhaal learned of the defeat of his flock as the surviving perytons came circling back to the well, and his rage caused deep cracks and gaping fissures to explode throughout the land, tearing still further at the wasteland of the vale.