Free The Korellian Odyssey: Requiem by Vance Bachelder

impossibly fast. Ten royal guardsmen appeared at each courtyard entrance and began running full stride toward Korel. Arinnea's eyes widened in a silent plea as Kelvin's grip tightened on her neck, his hands roughly pulling her behind an ancient pillar, his face alight with desire; the chorus of the surrounding mob rose to a pitch of frenzy, howls of laughter transforming into bellows for lust and blood, a pillar of sound soaring into the sky and churning the tired clouds into a cyclonic rage that swirled overhead, lightning flashing in torrents of angry spite.
    A shriek sprang from Arinnea's throat, her form obscured by the pillar, a cry of fear, pain, but mostly rage, the pillar vibrating slightly with its peal. As the guards reached Korel, a deafening clap tore through the sky above, a blindingly white scar searing the air, coming to touch upon the top edge of the pillar, blowing rock in all directions, and melting its topmost remnants, then continuing down along its descending edge to the ground, turning all it touched to clear liquid glass. Men fell to the earth and did not move.
    Shouts arose from the mob in the balconies as people fled in all directions, the tempest overhead continuing to rage, and over all the deep bellowing laughter of Toresten presided as a voyeuristic witness to the carnage below.
    Korel ran. How many broken limbs and body parts had he left in his wake as he fled the thirsty mob? He could not remember. He found himself running through the last outskirts of the city, ascending into the first foothills that made up the base of the Mount of Instructure. In a glen partway up the mountainside he collapsed as exhaustion took him and awareness left him.
    He gradually awakened to find the sun setting in the distant west, a west that seemed much more distant than when the day first began. Then he remembered how he had left Arinnea to her fate and a nauseous heat erupted in his belly, a burning akin to a coal dying from red to gray ash. And he wept. Tears fell to the glen floor, raising small bursts of dust. The thirsty ground eagerly drank the drops falling from his cheeks, and soon no trace of his sorrow remained.
    Anger and bitterness swept through him again, the dying ember flaring red-white hot. The ember whitened to a near hatred of Toresten and an even greater hatred of himself. As the heat eased but a little, Korel remembered the old histories taught to him in the catacombs of the record keepers, part of his initiatory training in the instruction of the Quenivorian. It was rumored in the histories that a sleeping power dwelt in the East, a power as old as creation, passing almost out of knowledge all but forgotten, alone, hidden from the eyes of men.
    As his mind wandered over the terrain of his own bitterness, there came over the distance the deep howl of wulvs (those wild ancestors of the common forest tracking wolf). Korel staggered to his feet and continued a loping trot east, straight up the face of the mountain.

Chapter 6
    T he wind played across the clearing, touching Korel's face. The smell of old ash, like remnants of forgotten memory, rode upon the air as the pale, wane light filtering through the mist-covered morning gradually penetrated the haze clouding his mind. Memory swirled around him and seemed to flash and grow out of the stone, trees, and air. The stone alter stood silently by, seemingly uncaring, unfeeling despite the pressure of memory rising out of the raw substance of the earth. In slow pieces, a numbing calm settled upon the clearing as Korel's memories began to sleep, receding upon the silence, fading into nothingness.
    He sat up and put his back against a tree, the cold firmness of the petrified wood seeping into his back to lodge in his spine. The coldness rode upon a wind that entered from across the clearing, dispelling the mists, pushing the last gray clouds away, and leaving a pristine gray sky. Still Korel sat motionless. The intermittent grasses bobbed their heads up