The Magic Flute

She was no longer laughing, but the smile had not left her face. Armada pressed forward against the much taller Dryn. Her stance was determined. She forced their staves to the side and kicked. Chrystal would not back away, and her eyes glowed with a gleeful fire. The other Dryn moved out of the way as Armada and Chrystal stalked around the practice floor.

The creatures swarmed around him like smoke. Tahrl shook his body and gripped his hands into fists at his sides. It was the man in the Cathedral who stood against the red darkness. Beyond the walls of the castle, Tahrl could hear the storm over the shouts of the Dryn. The wind howled as if it wanted to take the walls apart stone by stone. The thunder hammered as if it wanted to drive the castle into the ground.

Tahrl's vision blurred, and Armada moved so fast that he could not follow her attacks. The blows of the staves happened so often they seemed to be almost one continuous sound. The shadows swirled around him and blinded his eyes. They swept around, and long jagged fingers the color of burnt wood pierced his chest. Tahrl brought his arms up to cover his heart, and the creatures ripped it out.

Armada screamed. It was a scream of despair; the cry of the condemned thrown into the fire or lowered feet first into the heart of a volcano. The scream of an animal or thing that can feel the claws of a predator sink into its flank, and the beast knows that it is going to die. Her scream was like something that knew the sun would never rise again and was venting all of its anger and all of its feelings of helpless futility with the one sound.

Tahrl wiped the tears from his eyes and rubbed at his face with his hands. He realized that he was lying against the floor of the practice room and had curled himself into half a ball around his arms. The room was too small; there had been a much larger chamber that had been carved from stone. The room felt hollow as if it were not all there, and somewhere there had been someone, people, something, in caverns carved, formed, out of the living stone.

The floor was cold, and he felt as if there was something wrong with that as if the practice room should be heated from underneath. He had somehow managed to move from his side, and it seemed that people were shouting a long way off in the distance. There was no one else in the practice room, and there should have been people practicing, moving about, and laughing. Many a test of skill had been settled on the practice floor between the Dryn and the Kianan Soldiers, and someone had once told him that the soldiers learned much more about fighting through informal grudge matches on the practice floor than they ever did at training sessions.

Somewhere there were people making quite a racket from the sound of it, but they seemed to be far away. As he listened to the sound and tried to concentrate on it, the voices seemed to get louder and much closer. His knees shook as he brought them between himself and the floor, and he managed to rise slowly and unevenly to his feet.

The practice room was crowded with people. It wasn't empty; the practice room had never been empty. Most of the Dryn were shouting and moving about, and one of them was screaming what sounded hysterically with anger.