Staff and Shadow

Cold moved inside the smoke.

Fire still pressed against Maeril’s face. The pattern between her hands trembled in impossible colors, holding the larger giant beneath its turning light. But where Rishi should have emerged, flame bent away and red smoke darkened.

The cold spread.

One of Kora’s guards lost a step.

“Hold,” Kora snapped.

The guard forced his spear level.

The lesser giant turned toward the line. One hand swept low through the smoke, feeling for bodies small enough to break. Its foot crushed a burning shelter frame and drove sparks across the ledge.

Maeril tightened her fingers. The pattern shivered but held the larger giant.

“Rish,” she whispered.

Something moved in the smoke.

Not a body. Not yet.

The smoke buckled away from a shape the fire refused to show.

Spearpoints dipped along Kora’s line. One guard dragged his weapon back into place. Another retreated until his heel struck stone. Kora’s shoulders drew tight. Her own spear lowered a finger’s width before she forced it up again.

Maeril’s heart struck once, hard.

Rishi stepped out of the smoke.

Darkness rose behind him.

Ash streaked his robe and sandals. Blood ran from a cut at his temple. His hands held the staff where they always did, and the red cord remained at his wrist.

His eyes were black from edge to edge.

Two vast wings opened behind his shoulders. They had no flesh, no feathers, and no promise of flight—only ragged absence where firelight ceased to exist.

Cold moved with him. Flames guttered away from his robe. Maeril’s skin drew tight across her arms, and her next breath stopped high in her chest.

He did not roar. He did not bare his teeth.

He walked toward the lesser giant in silence.

The wings spread until they covered the fire behind him.

Maeril knew the set of his shoulders. She knew the hands around the staff, the careful placement of every step, the blood at his temple before he had touched it to learn how deep the cut ran.

She stepped back before she could stop herself.

Half a pace.

It’s Rish, Maeril told herself.

She went no farther.

The lesser giant saw the wings. Its hand jerked away from Kora’s guards, and its shoulders folded. Rage fell out of its face. A thin sound escaped a throat large enough to shake the stones.

Fear.

The giant dragged one foot backward through wet ash. Rishi followed, striking its wrist with his staff. Before the hand could close, he changed levels and drove the other end inside its knee.

The giant recoiled from the wings, stepping back once, then again, blind to the oil and ash beneath its heel.

Its foot slipped.

The giant flung out one arm. It smashed a half-burning shelter flat and knocked two kobolds into the fire. The other hand clawed at smoke. Its trailing foot found no firm ground.

“Down!” Kora shouted as the giant began to fall.

Her guards dropped beneath its sweeping arm. Smoke flattened in its wake, and its hip struck the stones along the ravine. The impact twisted its body, driving one knee onto a broken wedge of rock placed to kill wagons.

Bone cracked. The giant folded sideways with a howl that drove dust from the ledge.

Rishi stopped outside the reach of its grasping hand. For one breath, the black wings arched over it as it clawed backward.

Kora rose first. “Bows!”

Shortbows lifted at her command. Spears found openings. Arrows struck the giant’s throat and face; one buried itself beneath an exposed arm. A spear drove through the hand it had planted against the stone.

The giant stopped moving.

Rishi lowered his staff and drew one slow breath. The wings folded with the exhale. Darkness narrowed behind his shoulders, closed around him, and sank beneath his skin.

Firelight touched him again.

“Keep clear of the other one,” he shouted to the guards.

The guards breathed all at once. One cursed. Another laughed once, sharp and helpless, then stopped beneath Kora’s look.

Across the camp, the larger giant blinked.

Impossible color still turned before it. Its mouth closed. Its scorched face tightened, and both hands found the stripped tree trunk again.

The green stone in Maeril’s circlet brightened.

Keep looking. Just a little longer.

She drew on the circlet’s clarity, held every slipping fold of the pattern in her mind at once, and pulled them tight. For one heartbeat, beauty held.

Then the giant tore its gaze free.

Maeril opened her hands. The pattern vanished before it could take more strength and give them nothing.

The giant roared and swung through the last ribbons of color. Kora’s guards threw themselves apart as the tree trunk smashed through charred crates, hurling burning wood across the camp.

Rishi stood in the open, himself again. The giant found him and lunged.

Before its first foot came down, Rishi stepped inside the grasping hand and struck the wrist hard enough to turn the grip. The tree trunk swept after him. He slipped beneath it, and wood struck the stones where he had stood, sending chips across his back.

The ground jolted under his feet. He staggered half a step.

Maeril saw it. So did the giant, already tearing the trunk free.

Rishi looked left. A guard knelt there with blood on his brow. To the right, fire spilled from a collapsed shelter. Behind him stood Maeril and the narrow ground the others had fought to gain.

He set his feet.

The giant raised the trunk in both hands.

Maeril followed the path it would take. She saw the wood meet Rishi’s staff, saw his body driven into the stone before the blow had begun to fall.

“No,” she shouted.

Rishi lifted the staff as the tree came down.

Maeril reached through the pale grain beneath his hands, into the channels she had carved and the warding grammar bound into them behind the Emerald Door, when protection had been easier to admit than love.

Not today.

The staff answered. White-gold force ran along its length and opened into a hard curve above Rishi.

The trunk struck.

The ward did not stop the blow. It bent it.

The sound split the camp. Rishi folded beneath the impact, arms buckling as force drove through his shoulders and spine until both knees bent. His teeth snapped together. Blood darkened his mouth. Stone cracked beneath his sandals while the staff shook between his hands in a scream of white-gold light.

The same blow struck Maeril through their binding. Pain slammed up her arms and locked her jaw. The giant’s weight drove into her ribs and bent her knees as if she, too, stood beneath the trunk.

One hand struck the ground.

She held.

The trunk slid along the ward’s curve. Its last force pulled the giant forward. The burned leg came down badly on broken stone and buckled.

Kora drove her spear into the side of its knee.

“Now!”

The guards closed, spears entering low. One struck deep into the giant’s thigh. An arrow punched into its throat and quivered there.

The giant flung one arm backward and sent a guard rolling through the ash. The others held their ground.

As the trunk slid past him, Rishi let its force turn his body. His arms shook. Breath tore in his throat. He carried the turn inside the giant’s collapsing stance and drove the foot of his staff beneath its jaw.

The strike took everything the blow had left him.

The giant’s head snapped back. Kora tore her spear free and struck the failing leg again. Guards leaned into their weapons and forced the giant away from the line.

Its foot slid through broken stone and ash. The burned knee bent the wrong way.

The giant fell, striking the ledge with the weight of a hillside. Stone jumped. Flames guttered, and smoke flattened beneath the impact.

The tree trunk hit a heartbeat later and bounced toward the guards. The man with blood on his brow remained on one knee in its path. Kora caught the back of his armor and hauled him aside as the trunk rolled past and struck the ridge.

The crash rolled away through Fang Pass.

The camp kept burning.

Someone coughed until he retched. A guard groaned from the ground. Another whispered a prayer between torn breaths.

The surviving kobolds fled downslope. No one followed.

Kora looked once at the two fallen giants, then turned on her people.

“Living! Check the living before you admire the dead!” she shouted.

The guards obeyed. They moved slowly, hands shaking, but they moved.

Maeril remained on one knee with her hand raised toward Rishi.

The ward between them was spent.

Across the smoke, Rishi lowered the staff. Soot covered his face. Blood darkened his lip. His arms trembled hard enough to move the wood.

One of the guards cried out.

Rishi turned toward the wounded.