Free Dark Magic by B. V. Larson Page B

sun, and its light caused the mushrooms to smolder for a brief second, then explode into flames. He swung a two-handed swath, as might a man with a reaping scythe. Mushroom caps, flaming, popped up in a shower.
    The circle of gnomes stumbled back from the light and fire of Ambros momentarily, making sounds like showers of pebbles. But now, seeing their beloved ring broken and burning, they lost whatever minds they might have possessed. They rushed him blindly, stumbling into one another, falling and scratching their way over one another in their eagerness to get to him. He, the defiler, the meat-man who had dared to burn their holy place. They were desperate to reach him, to crush him with their fantastically heavy bodies.
    And Brand, for his part, surged to meet them. He slew the nearest with a crashing blow of the axe. The smoky, earthen ruin of its body sagged down. Before it had ceased flopping about, Brand leapt up upon its back and lay about him with the axe. Stone limbs and blank obsidian eyes were chopped and hacked and burst asunder like boulders cracked by a sledge. Brand used both hands to wield the axe, the better to strike harder and with more fury.
    With each alien life it took, the axe flashed. Rocky fists hammered his feet and his thighs but made it no further before they were struck off to lie thumping about on the dark ground. Spittle flew from Brand’s lips with the impact of cleaving thick stone, each shock running up his arms to jar his clenched teeth. His eyes started from his head as if they might pop out, and the axe kept flashing until there were no more charging rockmen, until no creature of stone that faced him was whole.
    He sucked in great gasps of air. The glade slowly dimmed as the axe, sated for the first time in long months, rested. Parts of a dozen rockmen squirmed in a great circle around him and he stood upon their stacked bodies. His legs were bruised. His smashed toes bled inside his boots.
    A thought struck him then. Where was Telyn?
    “Telyn?” he asked the gnomes, but they did not reply. Only a few still writhed and had not yet passed on to whatever hell rightfully awaited them.
    Brand, knew a moment of panic. He checked the blades of the axe for blood, but saw none. He did not think he had cut down his lady, but he could not be sure. He climbed down from the mound of stone corpses and shoved them aside, straining to look beneath. He commanded the axe to shine, and it did, but the glare did not help, only managing to deepen the pooling shadows beneath the gnomes.
    Finally, he had an idea. He allowed Ambros to dim to nothing. Telyn had been carrying a light. If she were down there, he should be able to—
    There! An unearthly gleam, somehow still pure in this place of foulness. He lifted a massive stone leg, roaring like a man possessed. Beneath it, he found Telyn. Her body bled in several spots, but she breathed yet. He draped himself over her, and gently cradled her, kissing her closed eyes gently.
    To himself, with great relief, he chanted one thing over and over.
    “I did not kill her.”

Chapter Seven
    The Crone’s Chimney
     
    Piskin finally found Oberon in the Great Erm, a tremendous forest which existed only in the twilight lands, and only for those who could survive long enough to find it. The Erm was quite literally the last place he had looked. Oberon had not been at any of his usual haunts. The mounds were empty, with no sign of the elf lord and his court of dancers. His palace in the cliff face, the entrance to which often vanished for days at a time, was deserted, devoid of feasting elves. A dozen other places he searched: the underwater grottos, the icy mountaintop plateaus and even the enchanted woods where every tree had a delightful wood nymph residing within.
    As a last resort, Piskin had journeyed to the Great Erm. It was an imposing place, with trees as thick as barges and as high as small mountains. Everything there was out of scale, fantastically larger than