The Spindleblade was heavy in her hands, the point dragging through the water. She could barely lift it, let alone cut her way through a forest of tentacles to the glimmer of gold rippling through the kraken. Her heart faltered. Corayne felt her body flag, her limbs threatening to give out. Exhaustion fell in a heavy curtain. She gritted her teeth, fighting to stay upright, to stay moving.
On the other side of the oasis, among the palms, a figure crossed the water, letting it ripple around her waist. No soldier or snake followed. She was alone.
Gray water, gray hair, gray clothing. Hands like the gnarled roots of a white tree. Eyes like the clearest sky.
Valtik.
The old witch faced the kraken without hesitation, her face upturned to meet its glare. Her braids were undone, woven with bones and palm. Her ratty old dress floated behind her, somehow too long. The sun reflected on the water, dappling her with an odd glow of light. Her hands spread wide, fingers splayed like the points of a star.
She chanted, the Jydi language filling the oasis, the hum of it sharp and visceral. It shuddered through the beast, curling its tentacles inward.
“The gods of Meer have spoken,” Valtik said, raising her voice and her chin as she switched to words they all understood. “The beasts of their waters awoken.” Though she didn’t move, the water around her rippled, pushed by something. “These lands are not your own; I bind you and banish you by rite of blood and rite of bone.”
The kraken howled, the sound shredded and deafening. Corayne held her grasp on the sword, fighting the instinct to cover her ears.
She couldn’t believe her eyes as the beast obeyed, even against its own will. It trembled, shifting, pulling backward inch by inch, the flesh of its body disappearing back into the Spindle.
Corayne took a step forward.
Valtik curled her fingers until her hands became claws, her wrinkled brow tightening as she grimaced, her voice never stopping.
“Be gone, be gone, be gone,” she growled, in seemingly every language. The words of the witch were as a hurricane blowing, breaking over the infernal monster. It twisted and fought, the worms of its body slapping against the flooded ground, sending up sprays of foul water.
Corayne kept moving, the others beside her. She saw the flash of their steel, felt the air stir as they moved, the water flowing around her knees. Sand slid under her boots, turned to mud. It sucked at her steps, grasping her ankles, trying to hold her back.
“These lands are not your own!” Valtik wailed.
A shadow passed over the sun and a tentacle fell like a collapsing tower, the kraken shrieking its killing blow. Until Dom’s sword wheeled, cutting through stinking flesh, sending the appendage plunging into the water, the end still thrashing.
The kraken’s eye rolled and disappeared into the thread, the last of its wriggling tentacles weak and coiling.
“I bind you and banish you by rite of blood and rite of bone.”
Even the geyser sputtered, its whitewater force pulsing.
Corayne felt her skin and muscle part as she ran her hand down the edge of the Spindleblade. Her blood joined the rest, a glittering crimson, carrying with it the hope of the realm. The hope of her father. The hope of herself.
The gash in her palm smarted as she returned her grip to the hilt, blood welling between her fingers. Another tentacle squirmed toward her, reaching like a vine, but Andry knocked it away, his sword dancing. She kept walking, the water cold, the wind cold, the sword cold.
The Spindle, needle thin, winked like a star. It caught its own light, too bright to stare at for long. Corayne expected a glimpse of another realm, the mighty oceans of Meer crashing beyond. There was nothing but the kraken, trying to battle its way into Allward. It weakened, its screams distant and echoing, the jolting motion of its tentacles going slow. One brushed her cheek, barely the touch of a hand. She ignored it. There was nothing else but the Spindle, the call of it a hook in her heart, tugging her in.
“For the Ward,” she murmured. For us all.
The Spindleblade rose and arced, cutting across kraken flesh and Spindle thread, trailing black blood and unraveling gold, the geyser raining down on her in a waterfall. It collapsed and fell to nothing, slapping against the flooded land, drenching them all to the bone. The kraken screamed again from somewhere far away and was suddenly silent, the tear of the Spindle wiped clean out of the air, like the gap in a curtain pulled closed. The remaining tentacles sank in the water, neatly cut from a body now realms away.
Without the steady flow of the geyser and Meer’s gateway, the flood melted, sucked into desert sand parched for centuries.