A Sneak Peak into The Forge of the Covenant

The setting is this: Lebía has just woken up to a changed world where nothing is as it seems. A Changer has sneaked into the protected haven of Ghavan, and he is holding Mirnían hostage. If Lebía will not bring Living Water back to him, he threatens to kill Mirnían. This is what happens immediately afterward:

Chapter Four

Lebía ran through a village ghostly in its lack of people. She saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. Only one thing remained—her driving need to go into the one place no one on Ghavan ever dared to go—the cave where, the old women whispered, Living Water still flowed. 

It was beyond the pale. Beyond the line of protection. Monsters lurked there. Monsters who, in the egg-world of the artisan, were still active. Were they only in his created world, or were they truly there?

As though they heard her thoughts, the vila shrieked as she passed the last house in the village and plunged into woodland. 

She stopped, frozen in place in utter terror. What could she possibly do against vila with their razor sharp teeth and their ability to suck the life out of her, should they choose?

Growling rumbled underneath the vila’s screams in a parody of harmony. The trees ahead of her—moss-covered willows bordering the Ghavan River, mostly—shook with the wind. No, it was more than the wind. Some thing was shaking them. 

Then she saw them—the rusalkas in the trees, their green hair waving around them as though they were underwater. With a gasp, she stumbled. The ground gathered around her feet, then took her legs and threw her forward into the forest. A crevice gaped ahead of her. She fell straight into the river.

The cold water yawned to swallow her up. The breath in her lungs, frightened clean out of her chest, had no intention of coming back. As she tensed her whole body to push herself out to breathe, iron fingers grabbed her hair and thrust her head underwater. 

No! Not rusalkas! Not the drowned ones!

She pushed back, trying to grab at the thing that kept her underwater, but there seemed to be no one anywhere around her. Just a disembodied hand holding her head underwater. 

Just as she thought her chest would explode from lack of air,  something shoved her as though she was an old door wedged in place by a rusted bolt. Spluttering and gasping for air, she pulled herself up by her nails clinging to tree roots covered in slimy, lime-green algae. She turned back to see two rusalkas fighting on the bank. Their nails were already bloody. 

Lebía pushed up against the ground as her feet churned the mud. Half crawling, half running, she went deeper into the forest. 

A shadow flitted between two pine trees—something horned and with hooves, but walking upright. The sight was enough stop her breath cold.

“Leshy,” she said to herself. 

Lebía tried to find herself inside the panic. 

This is real. This land. This haven. I am of it. I share in its protection. 

Lebía’s thoughts were jagged, almost not her own. But they were enough to force her upright.

She was running again. Nothing was going to stop her, even if she wasn’t quite clear where the cave was, exactly. All that was left was the compulsion, Mirnían’s pale face driving her forward. 

Less than an hour left.

A shape flew over her head, white and ragged like a ripped bedsheet. The song of the vila reached into her chest and tried to tear her heart out. The vila was all teeth—nothing but knife-teeth in a ghostly face, too long and pale to be human. The ground heaved under Lebía, the trees reaching down, not to grab, but to strike her down. Lebía fell to the ground, scrabbling in the dirt as she tried to pull herself away from the three vila—there seemed nothing but teeth, nothing but teeth—as they swooped over her body. Their songs scratched at her from the inside of her chest. The dirt dug into her nails. Her palms glistened with blood when she turned them over. 

Before she knew what she was doing, Lebía had a tree branch in her hand and she swung wildly at the vila, over and over again, until the shapes floated off and howled away into the mist creeping between the trees. 

A horned shape resolved itself from the tree-shadows. The leshy— horns of a ram adorning a bearded face with third horn coming out of its forehead. It was covered with fur dripping from the mist. Moss clung to the fur all the way to its goat-hooves. The six fingers of each hand were tipped with razor-sharp nails. 

It snarled, exposing two rows of sharp teeth. The growl coming from it seemed to come from underneath the earth. It promised not mere death, but pain. A lot of pain. 

Lebía ran, conscious that her legs were gouged from running through brush. Something slashed across her back. Fire-pain laced across her shoulder blades. 

No, I will not stop. 

Four horned leshy blocked her way now. One of them brandished a tree stump. It ran at her, with the three others running after it, roaring. Terror overwhelmed her. She seemed to herself from the side as she crumpled down to the leaf-mold, covering her head with her hands. 

She felt the breath of the monster on her neck. It stank like something she had no words for. The voice was inside her head even before she heard it through the creaking of the trees and the rushing wind in the leaves. 

“Go back,” it growled. “It is ours now. We will not share it. Go back.”

She blinked. 

She must have passed out from the fear. 

How much time do I have left?

The leaves fell down on her like a bright orange rain. She lifted her palms. They looked more like ground meat than human hands. Something ached in her neck. She tried to touch it with her bloody hand, but she left arm could only rise so far. It was probably dislocated, if not broken. She licked her lips, sensing blood pouring from somewhere on her face. They were salty with caked blood. She shifted her weight, and nearly screamed. Her legs pulsed agony through her body every time she tried to move. 

I’m broken, she thought. I’m going to die here.

But the compulsion pushed her. She looked around. Whether it was chance or some leftover of Aína’s grace, the place was familiar. And just in front of her was the cave with the Living Water. 

None of the leshy were there. But she knew they were just waiting in the shadows. Maybe they preferred their prey to be running scared when they killed it.

“Last chance,” the wind whispered. 

Expect it wasn’t the wind. It was something that looked like a human being distorted to the height of a tree. Grey skin stretched over sharp skull-bones. Branch-like hands extended from a body wreathed in a robe that looked like moss-covered bark. Hair like slugs framed a grey face with jowls sagging to either side of a single eye socket with a red-rimmed eye. She recognized it from her Vasylli childhood. That was Likho, the one-eyed reaper of souls. All the worst nightmares of Vasylli children made flesh. 

“I will not take your spirit,” Likho breathed in a voice like winter cracking dead leaves. “But you must go back. You fear me? You cannot imagine what the horror is that awaits you on the other side.”

Lebía should have fainted with the fear. But her head was strangely clear.

Why are they all trying to stop me? Why haven’t they just killed me? Something is wrong here.

It was a foolish thought. And yet…

She pulled her body forward with her hands, pushed soft earth with her half-dead legs, inch by inch. Something hard caught at her ribs with every breath. 

Please, let me not be too late!

It was pitch-black inside the cave. As her eyes grew used to the darkness, the skin on her neck curdled. Something was wrong: the smell. There was nothing in this cave but the warm smell of loamy earth and rock, she was sure of it. 

She saw the place where the Living Water was supposed to be. There was nothing there but a dry clay bed. There had not been any water there in years.

“So you have come at last,” wheezed a voice echoing as though the walls themselves had hundreds of mouths, all speaking in unison.

She turned to see a huge head lodged in the ground of the cave, aligned with the mass of the back wall where the pool of Living Water used to be. Its hair was the roots of trees that grew in the ground above their heads. Its face was no different from muddy rock. Its eyes… It had no eyes. 

But she was wrong. It did have eyes. They were stuck to the ends of eye-stalks that fell all the way to the ground and could not lift themselves up.

She had heard of this abomination. The Vyi. Anyone who saw it would die within a day. Anyone whom it looked at would lose his soul instantly.

The vila shrieked as they flew into the cave and circled Lebía, coming closer and closer. Even in the half-murk, their teeth glittered. The leshy stood at the mouth of the cave, intent on keeping her in. Two of them walked up to the Vyi, sidestepping Lebía, and lifted the huge eyelids of the Vyi until two massive slitted cats’ eyes stared at her. 

“Now, I take your soul,” it said. “The rest will feed on your bodies.”

Something glimmered in the corner of Lebía’s vision. A light, shimmering gold. As though there was a pool of water in a room filled with candles. 

Through the light. Break the eggshell.

The compulsion grabbed her. She pushed with all the strength she had left in the direction of that light. 

She remembered standing in the middle of the river, seeing Aína lying dead on the other side of a transparent wall. Her Aína. Her soul-bond. She saw Mirnían’s eyes open as he gasped and blood flowed out from his mouth, preventing him from calling out or even breathing. 

Her tears washed blood and mud off her face as she pushed against something that felt like raw hide. It glowed. 

All the beasts behind her roared and growled and shrieked at once. She felt them rushing at her. 

With a final heave, she broke through the barrier and fell. 

Light washed over Lebía’s fallen body. 

She tried to open her eyes. She couldn’t. 

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