Rise of the Spider Goddess (8 page)

* * *

“Nakor!”

Nakor jumped and opened his eyes. Galadrion was staring down at him, while Pynne and Whoo hovered nearby, looking concerned.

“I'm okay,” he muttered. He sat up, still feeling tired. “How long have I been asleep?”

“It's midday,” Whoo answered. “The rest of us have eaten already, but Thomas said not to wake you.”

“But then you were having some sort of nightmare,” Pynne added, “So we woke you up anyway.”

Nakor smiled weakly at her logic.

“Nakor,” Whoo said, “I have a question for you.” He paused for a moment. “Where are we?”

“In a temple,” Nakor replied.

Whoo rolled his eyes at that. “What kind of temple is this, and who are the priests who live here?” he demanded.

Questions that would have made much more sense for someone to ask several scenes ago.

Nakor leaned his back against a wall and ran his fingers through his hair. “I don't know, exactly.” he began. “I came to this area a year and a half ago, trying to escape from the death that seemed to follow me and those I cared about.” He shivered once, recalling his dream.

“I had been following the river, and eventually it led me to the ruins of an ancient castle. While I was exploring it, I stumbled upon the family of bears that was already living there.”

Nakor remembered his shock as he and the bear stared at each other, both uncertain how to react for a moment. That moment had allowed Nakor to cast a spell, after which he spoke to the bear and assured it that he meant no harm.

“I lived with the bears for about a year,” he continued, oblivious to the looks of surprise on his audience. “Then they took off to find someplace new.” He smiled, remembering. “Apparently I made their cave smell like elf.”

“A few days after I arrived, Thomas came to visit me. He invited me back here, to his temple. He never did explain exactly what god is worshipped here. From what I've gathered over the past year and a half, the priests are devoted to peace and knowledge. Aside from that, I know little of their religion. Once we arrived, he took me into a room and we sat down together. Then he began to talk to me. Talking about Olara…”

You know how they say if your only tool is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail? I'm starting to think the only tool in my writer's tool box was the flashback.

Thomas had stared at Nakor for a long time, and neither spoke. Finally, Thomas broke the silence.

“It wasn't your fault,” he said softly.

Nakor stared, confused, at this odd man in his grey robes. “I don't know what you're talking about.” he replied.

“Calugar lied to you, he used you to free his goddess.” Thomas explained. “There was no way you could have known.”

Feeling suddenly vulnerable, Nakor stood up and took a step toward the door.

“Sit down, Nakor,” came the soft voice of the priest. “You're safe here. I know about these things because they affect all of us. I could feel it when Olara was brought back. I spent the next few days trying to figure out how it was done, and who was involved.”

He looked sympathetically at Nakor. “I also know what happened to the others.”

Nakor sat down hard. He rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes. “I should have been there. I was too slow to save Roth. Too late to save Caudi.”

He looked into Thomas's eyes. “I wasn't even around when Wanni and Serina were murdered!”

“There was no way you could have been everywhere at once.” Thomas answered in a gentle voice. “There was no way you could have known.”

Nakor lowered his eyes again. When he spoke, his voice was pure bitterness. “I should have.”

“And why is that?” Thomas asked. “Why were the lives of these people your responsibility?”

“What do you mean?”

Thomas looked at him sadly. “Each of your friends was just as responsible as you were for freeing Olara. Why do you take all of this responsibility upon yourself? No man can hold that much weight upon his shoulders.”

A tear fell from Nakor's left eye. He clenched his fists and looked up at Thomas. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Stop intruding on my angsty elf-pain!”

“Does that matter?” Thomas replied.

Something snapped inside Nakor. The months of pain and anger came rushing to the surface, and he stood up to grab Thomas by the front of his robe. “Of course it matters,” he shouted.

Thomas grabbed one of his wrists, and the next thing Nakor knew, he was lying on his back, staring up at the plain stone ceiling. For a brief moment, he lay there, stunned. He blinked, and the emotions came rushing back. Rationality completely forgotten, Nakor stood up and drew his sword, levelling the blade at his foe.

In Fantasyland, all monks are martial artists. Which makes you wonder why Nakor didn't know what he was getting into…

Thomas watched, calmly, without reacting.

Gradually, the tip of the sword began to quiver. Then it was slowly lowered to the ground. There was a metallic crash as the rapier slipped from Nakor's hand. Overcome by despair, he sank to the ground and clutched his head in his hands.

“My elf-pain is the ANGSTIEST elf-pain!”

Thomas walked over and lay a hand on his shoulder. Nakor looked up, tears flowing freely down his cheeks.

“You can sleep here tonight, if you wish,” Thomas offered.

Nakor nodded, too overwhelmed to speak.

“I stayed for about a week,” Nakor said, looking up at Galadrion, Whoo, and Pynne. “During the day, I did what work I could to help out. At night, Thomas and I would talk, sometimes for hours at a time.”

Nakor smiled. “Since then, I've come here when I needed a place to rest, away from the rest of the world.”

“So,” began Whoo, “would any of these people have some idea as to how we're going to kill Olara?”

“We?” asked Nakor, raising an eyebrow.

Raised eyebrow count: 9

“She burnt my wings!” Whoo replied, outraged. “I'm not just going to sit around and let her get away with that!”

Nakor looked over at Pynne.

“Every time I let him go off on his own, he gets in trouble.” she commented, smiling evilly. “So I guess I should go to.”

Or go “too,” even.

He turned to Galadrion, who simply nodded.

Taking a deep breath, Nakor addressed them all. “I don't know,” he pronounced. “I don't know how to kill a goddess, and I don't know how to keep her from killing us if we try.”

Silence fell over the room, as each person felt Nakor's despair spread out to touch them.

“This is my elf-pain, which I share with you in the ancient elven ritual of the misery-meld. ‘My angst to your angst. My pain to your pain…'”

At that point, there was a knocking on the door. Galadrion walked over to let Thomas into the small room.

“You must leave, soon.” he said, sitting down to join them. “While you remain in our temple, you are safe from Olara's evil. But soon she will know where you have escaped to. Once that happens, it will be impossible to leave here without being killed.”

Nakor stood up immediately, only to have Thomas laugh and motion for him to return to the floor.

“I said soon, Nakor,” Thomas explained. “Not now. Before you leave, there are things you all must know.”

“I haven't finished infodumping yet!”

“Such as?” Pynne asked.

“When Olara first returned to this world, she was weak.” Thomas began. “She was also vulnerable. For five thousand years, all of her power had been spent in surviving. It has been theorized that she would have eventually died there, once her power was completely depleted.”

“Since the day of her rebirth, however, she has been steadily growing. Each day she gains in strength. Even after two years, she is not as powerful as she once was, though.” He looked at Nakor. “This is why you still live.”

Nakor looked confused.

“Have you never stopped to wonder why Olara didn't simply kill you herself?” asked Thomas.

Nakor nodded in response.

“Do you remember the pain you felt when she returned?”

“It was like something ripping me apart from the inside,” Nakor answered.

“Not a bad description of what happened,” Thomas said. “Each of you who participated in that spell felt the same pain. Almost as if part of your very soul was being torn from your body. In essence, that's exactly what happened. Olara took the very life from you all in order to survive. She needed that energy to recover from the shock of being thrown back into our world.”

For the record, I wrote this long before Harry Potter came out.

Thomas looked at Nakor. “That is what saved your life.” He paused, trying to explain. “It's almost as if, by taking your life force, Olara became a part of you, and you of her. It leaves her unable to harm you without likewise harming herself.”

“In other words,” Whoo jumped in, “she can't kill Nakor without killing herself at the same time?”

“Either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.” -Sybill Trelawney, from the Harry Potter books. Which is exactly what I was trying to say, only J. K. Rowling did it much, much better.

“That's correct,” Thomas said. “It isn't an exact explanation, of course. She was still able to send others to kill Nakor without the fear of harming herself. But more important is the fact that once she gains enough power, she will be able to rid herself of her tie to you.”

“Once that happens, Olara will kill you.”

I think I gave that last line its own paragraph because I thought it would add emphasis and drama. Instead of adding confused readers saying, “Wait, who the heck is talking now?”

“So how long do we have?” asked Whoo.

“I don't know.” Thomas answered. “It has been two years. I suspect that Olara will have enough power soon, if she does not have it already. And once that happens…”

He let that sentence hang, unfinished.

“So what's to keep her from killing us the moment we leave here?” demanded Pynne.

“The coin I gave to Galadrion will hide you from her,” came the response. “Provided you stay within fifty paces of it.”

“Thank you,” Nakor said.

“So how do we kill her?” Whoo asked, hovering in midair.

Questing is hard. Fortunately, Thomas is here to spoon-feed them the answers. We're a step away from him giving them an instruction sheet by Ikea, with cartoonish diagrams and a little goddess-slaying allen wrench.

Thomas sighed. “As far as I know, Olara's only weakness is her inability to re-enter the temple from which she was freed. Yet even that would not destroy her. It would just cause her intense pain.”

“Intense pain is a good place to start,” Galadrion said dryly.

“Perhaps,” Thomas said with a slight smile, “but it is not enough. Which is why I need to tell you of Averlon.”

He sat back against a wall. “Averlon was an elf, a member of our order who lived about two thousand years ago. He was a minor priest, who for many years lived a simple and uneventful life.”

“He worked as a scribe, copying and recopying various works in the vaults. But one day, he read something that frightened him. Terrified, he took the book he had been copying and threw it into a nearby fireplace, destroying it. By doing so, Averlon violated one of our most ancient laws.”

I have strong feelings about book burning.

“Averlon's membership in our order was revoked, though he was invited to remain and live among us. But Averlon chose to leave, still terrified by what he had read. When asked about it, his only reply was to mumble about ‘the spider.'”

Thomas paused to let the significance sink in. “Years later, Averlon returned. He was old, and dying. He had with him the dagger of Olara, the same knife Olara wears at her side today.”

“He was ushered into the temple. There, we attended to his illness as best we could, but to no avail. It was a strange sickness, almost magical in nature. I suspect Averlon died an unnatural death. Oddly, though, he seemed content. The terror that had driven him away years before was gone.”

“The night before he died, he talked of many things. His journeys, the dangers he had faced, the mistakes he had made. But he took great pains to insure we knew of a scroll upon which he had written a spell. He described it only as ‘Olatha-shyre,' which means ‘Spider's Bane' in an ancient elvish dialect. Unfortunately, all he revealed of the scroll's location was that it was ‘safe from
her
.'”

Thomas looked at Nakor. “We have never been able to locate the scroll. We don't even know if it truly exists. If it is found, there is no way to say what the spell does.”

“What happened to the dagger he brought with him?” asked Galadrion.

Thomas gazed somberly at her. “It vanished from our vault two years ago.”

He frowned for a moment. “You must leave now.” He stood up and escorted them to the temple's doors as he talked. “Olara's priests are approaching from the north. If you head south, then turn east, you should be able to make it back to your home without incident.”

“Also, I'm tired of infodumping.”

As they headed out the door, Thomas called after them. “Be cautious! I doubt Olara would be so considerate as to leave your home unguarded.”

Nakor turned to express his thanks, but the door had already been shut behind them. Grimly, the four of them headed eastward at a swift pace into the forest.

They were several hundred yards into the woods when they heard the horses. Pynne and Whoo disappeared, and Nakor and Galadrion fell to the ground to hide among the ferns and bushes. Looking back, they watched as a group of men approached the temple.

A black robed priest was talking to the initiate at the door, while twenty men on horseback waited behind him. They looked like mercenaries, to judge from the assortment of weapons and armor displayed.