Staff and Shadow

The camp roared around her. Fire ran through broken frames, and smoke rolled red across the place where Rishi had vanished.

Inside that smoke, the heat died—not everywhere, only where Rishi should have been.

Heat still pressed against Maeril’s face. The luminous pattern trembled between her hands, holding the larger giant’s gaze in impossible color.

Yet beneath the roar of fire and kobold screams, cold spread through the smoke, untouched by the flames.

One of Kora’s guards faltered.

“Hold!” Kora snapped.

The guard tried.

The lesser giant turned toward the line, one hand sweeping through smoke, searching for small bodies to break.

Its foot came down on the burning frame of a shelter and crushed it flat. Sparks spat outward.

Maeril’s fingers tightened. The pattern held the larger giant. Barely.

She looked again into the smoke. “Rish,” she whispered.

Something moved there. Not a body at first. A pressure.

The smoke did not part. It buckled away from whatever moved inside it.

Along Kora’s line, spearpoints began to dip. One guard caught himself and wrenched his weapon back into place. Another backed away from the smoke and struck his heel against stone. Even Kora’s shoulders tightened. Her spear lowered a fraction before she forced it level again.

Maeril’s heart kicked against her ribs.

Then Rishi came out of the smoke.

Behind him, darkness climbed higher than his body.

His robe and sandals were streaked with ash. He held the staff in both hands. The red cord at his wrist still showed.

Blood streaked one side of his face where grit had cut him. He looked like himself. None of it comforted her.

His eyes had gone black from edge to edge. Behind his shoulders, the darkness opened into two vast, flightless wings—no feather or flesh, only ragged absence where firelight should have been.

Flames guttered as he passed, bending away from his robe. Cold moved with him through the burning camp. Maeril’s skin tightened, and each breath stopped higher in her chest.

He did not shout or bare his teeth. He walked toward the lesser giant in silence. Behind him, the ragged wings spread until they blotted out the flames.

Maeril knew him. Her body stepped back anyway—half a step, no more. Her breath locked without her noticing.

Only then did she realize she was afraid of him.

The lesser giant saw him.

It had been turning toward Kora’s guards, one hand reaching low. Then its gaze caught on Rishi’s black wings. The reaching hand jerked back. Its shoulders folded inward. Rage vanished from its face. It made a sound no giant should have made. Not pain. Not anger.

Fear.

The giant recoiled, dragging one foot backward through the ash.

Rishi followed.

He struck with his staff.

No single blow could cripple something so large. Rishi did not need one to.

His staff cracked across the giant’s wrist, then struck inside its knee as it stumbled back. Both blows were precise, almost quiet beneath the roar of the burning camp. But the staff was not what drove it away.

The giant could not bear to let him nearer. It backed away, one step and then another.

Oil and wet ash slicked the stone beneath its heel. The foot slid out from under it.

The giant windmilled one arm, smashed a half-burning shelter flat, and knocked two kobolds into the fire like thrown rags. It tried to recover and found only more treacherous ground.

Kora saw the fall before it happened.

“Down!” she barked.

Her guards dropped.

The giant’s arm swept over them, flattening the smoke in its wake. Its hip struck the stones along the ravine. Rock cracked. The impact twisted its body, and its knee came down on a broken stone wedge meant for wagons, not flesh.

Something cracked deep inside the giant’s knee. Bone, or something near enough.

The giant folded sideways with a howl that sent dust and ash skittering across the ledge.

Rishi stopped just beyond its reach, black wings arched over the giant for one breath. It clawed backward across the ground.

Kora rose first.

“Bows!”

Kora’s command cut through their fear. The guards obeyed.

Shortbows lifted. Spears lowered toward the fallen giant wherever the angle was clear.

Arrows struck its throat and face. One buried itself in the soft flesh beneath an exposed arm. A spear drove through the hand clawing it backward.

The giant did not rise.

Rishi’s black-winged form had done what blades could not. It had stripped the giant of everything but the need to escape.

Rishi lowered his staff and drew one slow breath.

The black wings folded with his exhale. Something inside him closed its hand around the darkness and dragged it beneath his skin.

Firelight returned.

The guards dragged breath into their lungs all at once. One cursed. Another gave a single sharp laugh, then stopped when Kora looked at him.

Across the camp, the giant with the tree trunk blinked.

Once. Then again.

Impossible color still turned before its eyes, but its gaze had begun to track the battlefield beyond it. Its scorched face tightened. Its hands shifted on the trunk.

For one heartbeat, beauty held it.

Then pain found rage.

The giant tore free.

Maeril did not waste strength on a spell that no longer held. She opened her hands, and the pattern vanished.

Her stomach dropped as the giant raised the tree trunk.

It roared and swung through the last ribbons of light. Color shattered into smoke. Fire bent under the force of the movement.

Kora’s guards threw themselves aside. The tree trunk smashed through a stack of charred crates and sent burning wood in all directions.

Rishi was himself again.

The giant saw him.

It came for him.

Rishi read the giant’s bad footing before its weight came down. He slipped inside its reach and beneath one grasping hand, then struck the wrist hard enough to turn its grip.

The tree trunk swung slow but true, smashed into the stones where he had been, and threw chips across his back.

The impact jolted the ground beneath his feet. Rishi staggered.

Not much.

Enough for Maeril to see.

Enough for the giant to see.

The giant tore the tree trunk free of the stones.

Rishi glanced left. A guard knelt there, blood on his brow. To the right, a collapsed shelter spilled fire across the stone.

He did not look behind him. Maeril stood there.

The giant lifted the tree trunk with both hands.

Maeril saw its path. She saw Rishi set his feet.

For one terrible instant, Maeril saw Rishi already beneath the blow, crushed between wood and stone.

“No,” she said.

The word had no power.

The staff came up.

The tree fell.

Maeril reached.

She did not reach across distance.

She reached through what she had made.

Through the lines carved into the staff. Through the warding grammar she had laid into the grain.

Through her careful work behind the Emerald Door, when protection had been easier to admit than love.

Not today, she thought.

The ward ignited.

White-gold force ran along the staff and opened in a hard curve as the tree trunk struck.

It did not stop the blow.

It bent it.

The sound split the battlefield.

The blow folded Rishi beneath it. His arms buckled, the impact driving through his shoulders and spine until his knees nearly gave. His teeth snapped together, blood touched his tongue, and the ground cracked beneath his sandals. The staff shuddered in his hands while the ward screamed white-gold light.

Maeril felt the blow through the magic that bound them. It slammed up her arms, locked her jaw, and drove into her ribs hard enough to buckle her knees. For one terrible instant, the giant’s weight bore down on her bones as well.

She nearly fell.

The tree trunk slid sideways along the ward’s hard curve and pulled the giant’s weight after it. Its burned leg took the force on broken ground and buckled. Kora saw the weakness. Her spear drove into the side of its knee.

“Now!” Kora shouted.

The guards came in because they had to.

Spears first. Low and ugly.

One spear drove deep into the giant’s thigh. An arrow punched into its throat and held there, quivering.

The giant swung one arm back and knocked a guard rolling through ash, but the line did not break.

As the trunk slid past, Rishi let its last force turn him. His arms shook and his breath came torn, but the turn carried him inside the giant’s collapsing stance. He drove his staff up beneath its jaw.

He put the full force of the turn through the strike.

The last piece.

The giant’s head snapped back. Kora drove her spear again into the failing leg. The guards shoved with their spears, forcing the giant away from the line. Its foot slipped on broken stone and ash. Its burned knee bent the wrong way.

It fell.

The giant came down with the weight of a collapsing hillside.

Stone jumped. Fire guttered. Smoke blew flat beneath the impact.

The tree trunk struck the ground after the giant and bounced toward the guard line. The guard with blood on his brow remained on one knee in its path, staring. Kora caught the back of his armor and hauled him aside as the trunk rolled past.

The crash rolled away through the pass.

The camp still burned. Someone coughed until he retched. A guard groaned on the ground. Another whispered a prayer between ragged breaths.

The surviving kobolds fled downslope, shrieking as they scattered. None of Kora’s people cared enough to chase them.

Kora looked about the defeated giants for a breath, then found her voice again.

“Living! Check the living before you admire the dead!”

The guards obeyed, moving slowly, shaking but alive.

Maeril stood with one hand still raised toward Rishi. The ward between them was gone.

Across the smoke, Rishi stood with his staff lowered.

He looked barely upright after surviving something impossible. Soot marked his face. Blood darkened his lip.

Then one of the guards cried out.

Rishi turned toward the wounded, the staff still shaking in his hand.