Chapters (35)
Lydian peered out of the burrow, looking for what, I didn’t know. He closed his eyes and sighed in defeat before climbing back into the burrow. I made it a point to be as far away on the opposite side as possible from him. The entire trip I’d had a buffer between us with my other friends and comrades, and now I was alone with the goblin who not only admitted to torturing me due to his wrongful interpretation of a vision, but stated without any doubt or waver in his voice that he would do it again if he had to. I wouldn’t lie about how uncomfortable that made me, but I had to remember that he couldn’t do anything now. If anything, I was more afraid for my friends than Lydian’s shade.
But the fear for them didn’t have time to penetrate my mind fully as the ground started to rumble again, the little ice chunks and rocks shaking madly. The scent of something burning filled the air, and for a moment, all noise stopped from the tiniest of insects to the largest of monsters.
Fjalar cried out from his domain, just once, but once was enough to have the entire ground shake, to burn the air around us, and to take away our hearing, leaving us with ears ringing and bleeding from the loud shrillness of it all. It was like a combination of all the worst sounds—nails on a chalkboard, the shriek of a dying sow, the dying moans of the men on the shore of corpses, the battle cries of a team of goblin raiders as they tore about my home, the first time Lydian truly snarled when I was his captive, the anguished cries of Soren as his eye was ripped from his face—all of that and much, much more. All there was and all there had been was this sound, this deathly, shrill sound that shook the ground and broke the world around it.
When it stopped, all I could do was lie there in shock; from across the burrow, Lydian was also in the same pose.
“Two more cries,” he murmured to himself. “One for the dead, one for the chained, and one for the sleeping.”
But as our ears stopped ringing and began to pick up actual sound again, there was no second or third cry. We still had a chance to stop Fimbulwinter … except, did we really? Four out of six of us were majorly injured, and Lydian and I couldn’t kill it alone.
The sandbags pulling on my eyelids finally did the trick and my eyes closed. But instead of blackness, there was a white piercing light. It whispered to me as I fell into unconsciousness and told me what to do. My last thought before I drifted into sleep was if it would hurt very much to be eaten alive.