OathBlade (Wattys2015)

57. Soul Wounds*

No amount of time could erase the memory of Cylphi's last scream and expression of terror from Elery's mind. She woke to it fresh in her memory even after a full night's rest. Isandel lay beside her in his half-seryn form with her sword resting between them. It was sheathed and, most surprisingly, she was stripped of her armor and dressed in new clothes.

She sat up and covered her face until a sharp rumble in her stomach stirred bile into her throat. She turned onto her hands and knees and crawled several paces before tensing and retching.

Isandel woke to the sound and stood to rush over. He collapsed to his knees and pulled her hair back as she purged a vile concoction of acid and what little food remained in her stomach. Even with her belly empty she couldn't stop gagging. It felt as though her body was attempting to reject the pain in any way possible.

By morning the second day Elery had recovered enough to hold council with the elder aurels. She stood between Misani and Isandel in the thigh-deep grass under a great, wide tree. The aurels were each as expressionless as she who so gently touched Elery's cheek as she cried, and to look upon them was unsettling. At least, it might have been, if thoughts of Cylphi and the mess Elery had made of everything didn't occupy her every waking moment.

One aurel with great branching horns stepped forward and spoke words Elery could not grasp. Their language was one of delicate, flowing sounds that she held no hope of understanding.

"Great Spirit's companion does not look well," a dragon translated.

Elery kept her gaze locked on the tree behind the group. "I've come to ask your aid."

"Have we not given you our aid, landwalker?" he asked. "What more might we do?"

"Leria is in jeopardy." Her fists clenched at her sides. "We are threatened by a power which cannot die. One that has claimed more than it ever deserved. If we do not destroy it—"

"We welcome you to our home, young landwalker, but what you ask now is beyond our desire to give." The dragon settled upon his stomach as he translated the aurel's gently-spoken words. "We have long since distanced ourselves from your kind and its petty grievances. We do not fall into the trappings of war and destruction."

"Beyond your desire to give?" Elery snapped. Gone was the apathy left in the wake of her grieving as a new rage swelled within her. "You would sit by and watch the seryn people be reduced to shambling corpses?"

The elder stepped forward and spoke while the dragon translated once again. "You must understand that your kind has embraced a life of conflict. That which you sow you must reap. So long ago we shared our lives with your kind and lived as one with the world. We embraced the Great Spirits and the Great Spirits in turn nurtured us. Then the landwalkers sought to take more. They fought among the beastkin to take their forests. They fought among each other to establish territories, and all that was once one became separate and unequal. Now that it has come time for another to wage war against you, you find it distasteful. Had you no empathy for those your kind displaced?"

"You're saying we deserve this?" Elery shrieked.

"It is a regrettable turn of circumstance—"

"Then help us!" she cried. "You speak of the empathy we lacked as if you do not lack it yourselves! Do you think yourselves better than us by doing to us what we've done to others?" She searched their faces, finding nothing but blank, expressionless masks. "We are not merely dying..." Her throat seized and she collapsed to her knees. "This is so much worse...can you not see that?"

"If you will not do this for the sake of the seryn, do it for mine," Misani said from beside Elery.

"We honor you, Great Spirit, but you are not our mother spirit. It is by her desire we remain neutral. You are welcome to stay as long as you need—"