Roran Vottier's Arc

Chapter 8 of 10

Roran climbed the stairs with the burning sword high. Heat bled from the blade into his palm. Kaia came behind, the wolf ahead. The stone circle opened above them, its carved faces humming as the light passed. Roran felt the sword cool by a degree with each step. The fire would not last. He had to reach the shrine and speak the binding words before the gold went dark. The wolf stopped at the circle's edge and snarled. Roran looked up. The wraith stood between two stones. Its body curled like black smoke, and its red eyes fixed on Kaia. It did not come for Roran or the blade. It flowed straight past him toward the woman who carried the ritual in her blood. "It wants me," Kaia said. She did not run. She was the last of a family the creature had hunted for centuries, and Roran saw that she had always known this moment would come. "If it takes me, the words die. Then the flame is nothing." Roran stepped between them. The wraith lunged. He swung the burning sword, and light tore across the smoke. The creature shrieked and split, then pulled itself whole again. It circled, keeping the stones between them, patient, waiting for the fire to fail. The blade dimmed. Roran felt it. Gold sank toward gray at the tip. He had no shrine, no fire pit, no time to run. He looked at the humming stones. Blue-white light still crawled in their cracks, the same power that had opened the earth. The ground here was druid ground. Kaia's ground. "Say them now," Roran said. "Here." Kaia stared. "The ritual needs the shrine." "The shrine borrows this power. So do it here." The wraith surged again. Roran drove the fading sword into its chest and held it there. The creature clawed at his arms. Cold burned through his sleeves. He shouted through his teeth. "Speak!" Kaia knelt and pressed both palms to the center stone. She spoke the binding words, slow and sure, the sounds shaping in the air. The stones answered. Light climbed them and poured into the sword's dying flame. Gold flared bright again. The wraith writhed on the blade, pinned by fire and word together. It came apart. The smoke thinned, the red eyes guttered, and the shape broke into nothing between the humming stones. The clawing on Roran's arms stopped. Silence fell. The wolf lowered its head and went quiet. Roran dropped to one knee. The sword's fire faded to a warm glow, spent but whole. Kaia knelt across from him, shaking, alive. The creature that had killed her line was gone. Then the wolf turned east and growled low. Roran followed its gaze. Beyond the trees, past the barrow, the black doorway still poured rot into the ground. The wraith was dead. The blight it had bled into the earth for centuries was not.