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  “Their power must have been immense. Not just to construct the Temple and the thrones. But if what many now believe is correct, to divide their one world up somehow into many. Who can truly say what would have been possible or not for such a people? Certainly none of us.”

  “Perhaps they were once people who somehow forced their thoughts and maybe even their souls into the stone that directs the Heartfire. Or maybe they are simply the result of untold thousands of years of worshippers sitting on them, gaining magic and suffering immense pain, imbuing them with some sort of reflection of life.”

  “We cannot say. We may never be able to. But what we do know is that they're not going to help us. They're not going to fight. If they're not alive they have no reason to fear death. Or alternatively if the Temple survives, an eternity imprisoned alone in it.”

  The woman held out her arms in shared helplessness. “They're not living beings. So they aren't going to become our allies – nor our enemies. They have no regard for us at all. No regard for themselves either. And if the worlds end, that will not trouble them. No more than it would trouble the stones Master Chy polishes in that machine of his.”

  With that the dryads rose, thanked Elodie for her help one by one, and left her, heading she assumed for their new village across the road.

  But Elodie didn't get up. She simply stayed where she was trying to find the answer to one simple question – could they be right?

  They could be, it occurred to her. Their theory made sense. It fitted the facts. The ones that they knew anyway. And even if it was impossible, who knew what impossible was any more? But if they were nothing more than moving statues – automatons of stone – why had they bothered to take on the appearance of people? How had they spoken with her, read her thoughts as if they were living beings? And why had they spared her life? Why had they sent her here? That didn't seem like the actions of stone.

  And while she was considering that there was also the Heartfire – was it alive or not?

  She and the other guardians had had lengthy discussions about that very question in the Temple. Over meals and drinks. Trying to decide whether it was some sort of elemental energy like lighting or fire, or whether it was something more. Though of course they'd never come to an answer. Such questions were for the sages, not them.

  Maybe this wasn't the time to be wondering about such things. They had so much else to concern them. Building their massive spiderweb of portals so that they linked every town on every world and they could send people home. Trying to find out the magic that the sprites had used so that they might perhaps be able to undo it. Even if the thrones were walking around like people now, that didn't change those things. In fact it didn't really change anything – except that it made her feel like a fool.

  After all she had cared for these thrones for the last dozen years. Treated them like a favourite hunting bow or a carriage. Imagined them as being more than they were. Even bestowed her affections on them. And in the end they had never been worthy of such feelings.

  Maybe in the end it was just more evidence that she and the other guardians had never been worthy of the positions they'd been entrusted with. After all, they'd all had the same, mistaken beliefs about the Temple and the Heartfire and the thrones that she had. And one of them had even betrayed his or her duty. And now the world might be ending, in part because of their failures.

  Elodie gazed at the river, lazily winding its way along the land, and then the water in the sluice channel doing the same thing and turning the wheel. It was beautiful, she thought. And it was easy to imagine that it was more than that. That it was somehow alive with wonder. Many people did talk about land that way. Farmers often did. They were always talking about their land as if it was a living, breathing thing. But it wasn't. And it cared nothing for them. The life was not the land or the water or the sky above it. It was what lived in those things.

  She'd done the same thing. As a child she'd loved the wind. Played in it. Imagined that it was the breath of some great goddess upon her. Celebrated the way it had turned the sails of the mills. She'd even imagined she could talk to it. That it would talk back to her.

  But it couldn't. It wasn't alive. And neither was the Heartfire Temple, no matter her imaginings. She'd been deceived by its beauty and wonder. By its workings. By the immense energy that flowed through it. And so she'd wasted a dozen long years of her life caring for a machine. She'd thought of herself as an attendant to some sort of patient. A physician as the humans called them. Instead it turned out that she was merely an engineer. It was a bitter understanding.

  But what was there to do about it? Elodie stared at the river flowing lazily past the house, and tried to find an answer to that. But there was no answer. Only a river flowing endlessly on.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Another day. Another world. And this time Fylarne not only didn't know what day it was, he didn't know what world it was either. But he wasn't alone in that.

  They'd stepped on to a portal in the town of Hellbridge somewhere on Althern, knowing they were nowhere close to anywhere they wanted to be and stepped off here in a place of ice flows and tall trees. Very tall trees.

  They were conifers of some sort, but three or four times as tall as they should be. Not that that mattered. Nor was it important that it was freezing cold. They had thick clothes, fires and magic. They could keep themselves warm as they travelled. They even had food if they were going to be trapped here for a while. They'd resupplied themselves with anything they could use in Hellas. After all, no one was there to complain.

  What did matter was that this portal had opened in a place bereft of people. There was no town nearby. No hut even. No one to tell them where they were. Which left him wondering who would build a portal in the middle of nowhere? Or he had wondered that for a time. Until they'd tried to return and discovered that this portal only ran one way.

  He hadn't known that was possible. But obviously it was. It was just that no one would ever build a one way portal. Because it was completely stupid. What was the point of building a portal that couldn't bring you back? Especially when it brought you here?! Who would want to stay here?

  He'd thought for a while that maybe it was just one more example of the portals malfunctioning. Taking you to places they weren't supposed to go because the worlds were out of alignment. Some of the other portals had barely functioned when he'd used them and returning had been tough. But then he realised that it would surely either work both ways or not at all if that was the reason. And this one had brought them here perfectly. So it had to have been created specifically to be just one way and they were stuck here.

  Thankfully they did have one saving grace – Dah. The sylph was sensitive to portals. She hadn't mastered them. She couldn't rework the one they'd arrived at so it went into reverse – apparently that was impossible. The portal had never been designed to do that. But she could at least stand on the portal, sense the magical flows running through it, and work out that it was connected to a network of other portals. She could even pin point the direction of the closest one. So now she was leading them through this enormous ice covered forest towards it. And there they assumed, they would surely find people – or another portal that could carry them away.

  How many worlds had he travelled to? Fylarne wondered about that as he trudged through the treacherous forest floor, trying not to slip in the icy cold slush of mud and pine needles. He'd lost count long ago. Maybe he'd never really started counting. But it had to be scores. And the others were the same. But maybe the more important question was how many more he'd have to travel to before his time was done. Because this journey was starting to seem endless. An endless disappointment with the occasional splash of hope thrown in – only to be dashed of course.

  They'd found their way to Althern half a dozen times now. And on maybe five of those occasions they'd found themselves in the homes of humans with gifts and their own webs of portals. Humans who'd visited the Temple. He was just lucky
that none of them had recognised him. But none of the humans had a portal in Ruttland let alone Stonely. The reason was simple. Few humans had the gift and those that did only built networks of portals that ran to nearby towns – or else to the grand portal at the Temple. Places where they went. What were the chances that they would go to the two small towns?

  It seemed that this dream of a world spanning portal web did not include much of Althern thus far. And even if it did one day, what were the chances that it would endure when the portals kept falling out of alignment?!

  But they kept going because … what else was there to do? That was why he kept going after all. After Hellas he'd understood that. His family weren't going to come home by themselves. He was going to have to find them and bring them back. And Stonely was the way to do that.

  If only he'd sat on the snake throne a few times!

  “How can any piss pot world be this cold?!” Trey grumbled, pulling Fylarne out of his melancholy. The young man complained a lot.

  “You have a dragon to set it on fire,” Dah pointed out from the front. “That would warm things up!”

  Fylarne and the others might have said something, but they all chose not to. Over the endless days on the trail together they'd realised there was no point in arguing with the boy. No real point telling him anything. But even as he was deciding that yet again, a scent caught his nose and made him wonder.

  He could smell smoke!

  For a moment he wasn't sure of that. He wondered if maybe it was his mind playing tricks on him. All this talk of fire making him think he could smell it. But the longer he kept scenting the air, the more the smell persisted, and in time he mentioned it to the others.

  That brought the party to a halt and soon they too were sniffing at the air and agreeing with him. Agreeing too that it had to mean that there was civilisation nearby. A camp at least. And luckily it was in the same direction as the portal. Or maybe not luckily so much as typical. There was likely a town ahead. One with both some sort of caster and fire.

  They carried on, moving a little faster through the forest of giant trees, hoping to find somewhere to get out of this biting cold. And then maybe, another world. Somewhere nicer. Warmer.

  Of course it took time. The ground was still treacherous underfoot. The combination of mud, rotting pine needles and freezing cold slush was more than a match for their foot wraps. Maybe he should have rescued some more solid boots, Fylarne thought as he concentrated on putting his feet in the driest looking places in the poxy slush pile.

  But he also worried about what he might find ahead. He knew what most of those who visited the Temple said about their worlds. And none had mentioned giant forests or freezing cold biting at their skin. But then who would live in such a place? Trolls? Goblins? Casters came from both worlds, and they had mentioned the cold, but as far as he knew they both liked it dry. Giants too sometimes talked about the chill winds blowing off the mountains of their home. But not forests of giant pine trees and rivers of flowing ice.

  Fylarne didn't know this place. Or he didn't recognise it from anything he had heard about for the past decades. That worried him. But like the others he continued walking and kept his worries to himself. They wouldn't help.

  And then he felt something else. Something he hadn't expected. Magic. But not cast magic. Not well controlled and organised magic such as one of the worshippers might cast. Instead he felt raw, wild magic. Chaotic magic. It wasn't strong. And it wasn't coming from one place but rather an area. But still he knew it. It was the Heartfire!

  He stopped and pulled up the others. He had to. Because this was strange. It might even be dangerous.

  “This doesn't make any sense,” he began, “but there's magic ahead. Wild, exuberant and uncontrolled magic. Heartfire.”

  “You … what? Dah asked, looking confused. “I don't sense anything.” And her point was that she should. She was the most attuned to the ebbs and flows of magic. The strongest caster among them. So she kept telling them.

  “Spike feels something too,” Trey added. “She's nervous.”

  How a tiny dragon could be nervous Fylarne didn't know. And certainly there was nothing on the little black monster's face that spoke of any such thing. But the boy knew his pet. Despite it being madness, the two shared some sort of bond. What it meant that the dragon was nervous though, he couldn't say.

  “I don't know what it is,” he continued. “I just feel it, washing over my skin and through my bones. It's not strong and it's not in one place, more scattered. But it's there. We should be wary.”

  That was unfortunately as much as he could tell them, and so soon they were moving on again, perhaps a little more slowly than before and stopping every so often to smell the smoke.

  Twenty minutes later they came across their next surprise. But at least it wasn't dangerous. Sheep weren't dangerous. But they also weren't seven feet tall at the shoulder.

  “Giant trees, giant sheep,” Allide commented quietly as they stared at the monstrously large beast wandering through the forest in front of them.

  “A lot of eating too,” Griss added. “This beast could feed a village for a week! Two!” Instinctively his hand reached for the bow on his back, before he stopped it. “But it would be a waste. We couldn't eat all the meat nor carry it with us.” He seemed sad about that. “The Huntsman would be displeased.”

  “But what else around here is huge?” Fylarne asked quietly. “The trees are huge, the sheep that surely graze upon their needles are huge. What about the wolves that feed upon them?” And he didn't want to meet a wolf that was large enough to bring down a beast of this size. Things had been quiet so far, but now he was starting to worry.

  After the sheep had moved on they continued their journey, but perhaps even more slowly than before. After all, along with everything else, the portal was ahead. It was their way off this world.

  But then when they finally reached the edge of the trees, they stopped again. Because the world wasn't what it should be.

  “Taran take us! That's not a town!” The wood elf spat out the obvious for them all to hear after a lengthy period of time just standing there at the tree line, staring.

  He was right. It wasn't a town. There were no buildings for a start, and towns had buildings. But it did have people. Lots of people of all the races, and most of them carrying pickaxes and shovels. Pushing carts loaded down with ore. And there were endless mounds of earth piled up everywhere, from where the ore had been dug. This was a mining camp of some sort, Fylarne eventually realised. But why were all these people busy mining the ore? People who normally didn't mine at all.

  He saw dwarves, and was at least unsurprised by their presence. But they weren't alone. There were also giants – of all types. Frost giants, hill giants and titans. Did they mine? He didn't know. Humans mined and he saw plenty of them wandering back and forth with their tools. But he also saw elves. Sun elves, wood elves, high elves and copper elves, doing the same. And there were sylph carrying heavy tools. He knew little of the sylph, but he was absolutely certain that they never engaged in any sort of physical labour.

  That didn't make sense.

  But strangest of all he saw sprites among the miners. Tiny little figures lugging around huge tools that were almost larger than they were.

  Fylarne saw them and for a moment the anger flared in his veins, and he wanted nothing more than to go and hit them. To smash them into puddles of red. But then confusion stole his anger away. They were dressed in rags. Everyone was dressed in rags. They were covered in dirt and black soot. And not a one of them looked like any sort of noble. They looked like beggars!

  What was happening? He stared at them in disbelief. These weren't the people who had come to the Temple and ordered him around as if he was a slave. These people were if anything, slaves themselves. How could that be? And how could they possibly swing a pick axe that had to weigh nearly as much as they did? Or use a shovel that was larger than them? That didn't make sense. But they were
doing it. Struggling desperately to use the tools to dig the ore and load it into the carts. More of them then pushing those carts, even if it took a dozen of them to do it.

  Why were they doing it? The dwarves and the humans had mines. But from what he knew they used their huge, smelly steam powered wagons to do much of the work. And the others if they mined at all, surely used animals to pull them. As for his people, the Darisen would use magic. What was the point in getting sprites to push huge carts full of ore? Or anyone else? It made no sense.

  “Where are their wings?” Dah unexpectedly asked.

  “What?!” Fylarne was caught by surprise by the question. But then he realised as he looked more closely, that she was right. The sprites, the only people in all the worlds that had wings, were missing them. He couldn't see a set of gossamer wings anywhere. Did their wings come off?!

  Then he remembered some of the tales they'd heard as they'd travelled. Tales about the sprites also wandering the lands, looking lost and confused, and having wings that for some reason drooped. Maybe they'd rotted completely away? Maybe this was what their great spell had done? Thanks to his tampering with the books. He suggested that to the others, though not the part about what he'd done of course. He had never told them that, though he was sure they guessed some of it.