Tundra

Scarlet rained down like manna, dousing the snow with soggy patches and slicking the shining foliage of Mossen Grove’s fast splintering trees. This same foliage seemed to repel the fires the Seafarers lit under Erasmus’ orders, reluctant to burn. The forest had a personality, and it, too, was a combatant in the war. It was not content to simply be fought over. As I watched in stunned disbelief, roots dredged themselves up out of the soil like the limbs of kraken breaching the ocean’s surface and snaked sinisterly around the ankles of some of Erasmus’ more unfortunate minions. Elsewhere, the shaggy undergrowth of the forest became a devouring trap, while low-bent branches hung heavy with fruit pummelled those invaders who attempted to duck under them.

While the forest unearthed gnarled tentacles in sea of battle, restless spirits provided the foam on the waves. Some fell under the control of the Mossen Grove druids, and fought with a vicious and perpetually shifting armoury of teeth, horns and claws. Others had broken free of all command and reverted to their natural predatory behaviours. Both kinds of silvery sprites wreaked havoc with their instincts, darting in and out of fighting pockets as the combat spread and the Seafarers drove the mammoth riders back into smaller and smaller bands.

As the chaos boiled, crushing the snow into mush, Hackley and I took our cue to ascend above the commotion on pedestals of broken logs. We dragged Aais with us– he would have been of no use and in much danger on the ground. As we lunged skyward, the horizon seemed to tilt. Something uncanny was happening– the earth appeared both up and down. There was far too much of it. At first, I thought we might crash, but then I realised that we were in fact ascending. It was just that something colossal was blocking out a section of the sky; something vaguely blue-grey and covered with hills and colourful forests infected with break-outs of fighting parasites.

From beside me, I heard a voice that told me Hackley was seeing the same impossibility. ‘We need to stop that thing,’ she said, resolutely.

‘The druids are working to free it,’ I assured her. ‘We need to delay it until they do.’

Aais was also staring at the lumbering behemoth. ‘I can try,’ he said, meekly. ‘Or rather, my elder can. What do you need?’

‘Just my skin kept intact–’ I said through gritted teeth, the wind nearly stealing my words away.

‘As you wish.’

‘–I’m going down there.’

As I swooped low, diving off the log I had been levitating and allowing it to crash to the ground, I heard Aais listing off colours to Hackley, who created them as bursts of fireworks in the sky. The wind snatched at my robe with hungry teeth as I fell, letting it flap freely in some place and plastering it to my body in others. I felt my heart crushed by the pressure of my ribs as the air drove up against my chest, my eyes forced open and my ears closed by the speed of my descent. The earth rose up to meet me, but it refused to stay flat.

The angle of my view prevented me at first instance from ascertaining that the inevitable wall of dirt, rock and trees was lifting up, but it was. First the ground began to peel back, and then a mountain erupted, growing to an impossible height, reeling tentacles raised up like prongs above its single, molten orange eye. Immediately, the flailing arms of the elder reached for its brother’s bulk, one god attempting to ensnare another. As the two creature continents wrestled, sending waves of earthquake rippling out across the land, I slowed my fall, just managing to alight on the back of one of the beasts without being squashed. As I rolled away, aching and bruised, a tentacle slammed down where I had lain. I quickly brushed down my robes, and found myself face to face with the last person I expected to see.

‘Eiron!’

Unmistakeably marked with images of suckered limbs like the one that had almost smashed me, the largest Seafarer I had ever met stood surrounded by a band of his brothers. He introduced them briefly as Silt Strangers before getting on with a characteristic sarcastic boast. ‘It turns out, I can convince Seafarers to fight one another,’ he growled. ‘Clearly, I am the greatest leader of my generation.’

‘Don’t let it go to your head,’ I advised him, bracing myself as the ground below me rocked suddenly. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘These are Erasmus’s reserves,’ Eiron explained. ‘They’re not going anywhere.’ His whole body stiffened, like a hound before a hunt. ‘Where’s the man himself?’

‘You see that thing?’ I pointed at the skitterer, a glint of gold on the horizon, striding through the forest of the Grove like a scorpion through moss. ‘That enormous walking thing? He’s there.’

‘Right,’ Eiron replied, without any trace of humour or surprise. He readied his axe and turned his back. ‘Keep my men alive for me. I’ll be back with his head.’

‘Eiron, wait–’

But the Seafarer had already marched off, striding towards the site from which smoke was beginning to stream in black columns– Erasmus was evidently succeeding in setting fire to the grove. A circlet of trees was already blazing bold as a forge, the steel structure at its centre glowing red-hot like a menace newly forged. I turned my back on the scene, thinking that if I didn’t see the destruction of Mossen Grove, maybe, in some twisted way, it wouldn’t happen. I focused instead on casting shields over the Silt Strangers, and contributing to their triumph in whatever small ways I could. I was preparing my first offensive spell when something hit me squarely between my shoulder blades, knocking the breath out of me. I fell onto my face, and when I propped myself up, a familiar face was grinning over me.

‘So, you’re the mage who thinks he can save the tundra?’ the druid asked. His hair was wilder than it was when I had last seen it, if that were possible. The rest of him seemed to have gone to seed. He was covered in dirt, and wore the calloused mask of winter in place of the graces of spring.

‘Yes,’ I answered him, because it seemed like the only sensible thing to say.

The druid laughed first, and then spat. ‘What are you? You’re nobody. You’re not even from here!’ And with that, he gathered himself, and coaxed up vines that wrapped around me, whispered out of the earth. It was all I could do to sever them with an incantation– I had no parchment runes left to cast.

A bolt of lightning stabbed its way out of the sky, and land in a charred patch of earth, barely missing me as I scrambled back. ‘There is nothing you can do here,’ Grissos shouted. ‘You know that, don’t you? I have already won.’

I sent a minor blasting spell in his direction. It connected with his chest, sending him staggering back a step. ‘Then why are we fighting?’ I demanded to know. ‘If you’ve won, why are you here?’

‘I will not allow Mossen Grove to survive,’ he called back over the rumbling of his own earthquake. ‘They need to see that I was right. There is no reason we shouldn’t rule the tundra, there never was. There is no reason for the change in seasons.’

‘You don’t honestly believe that, do you?’ I taunted. A rain of hail knocked me down for my cheek. I struggled back up before its successor could hammer into me. ‘You know that a world where the spirits had free reign would be chaos. They’d wipe us all out.’

‘Who are you to tell me what the spirits would and would not do?’ Grissos asked. ‘You’re a southerner–’

‘And I should know my place and not question a druid? That was never an answer for you, why should I accept it?’

The earthquakes created when the elders collided began to intensify, shaking my world so thoroughly that it was a wonder I didn’t go sailing off the edge. The druid seemed able to ignore them– they did not dissuade him from his speech.

‘You don’t have to accept anything,’ he said. ‘You’re a dead man, and I am eternal. I am the Otherworld, and I will not be denied. Why are you still fighting me?’

I stood still, a lopsided smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. ‘I’m not.’

I felt the ground lurch, and then the shudder I had been expecting for a while. It had almost come too late. There was a gushing of steam like the thundering of an upside down waterfall as spirits were expelled from the earth, naturally propelled skyward. Although they existed on another plane of reality, I could still see them, spouting and spiralling, glad of being free.

Courage came, and I found the words I had been dying to say. ‘All of this was only ever a distraction.’

My smirk faded as I was thrown from the elder’s back. I felt my body flying through space, slowing with the whisper of a spell, at the same time as the oak-thick tentacle landed, thudding into dust where Grissos lay.