DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) Read Free

turning, “and so’ve the chickens.”
    “I’ll feed ’em,” Brennilee said quietly, too quietly. Merry Cowsenfed quickly closed the distance to her unexpectedly fragile-looking daughter and brought her palm up against Brennilee’s forehead, feeling for fever.
    “Are ye all right, girl?” she asked, and then her eyes widened, for Brennilee was warm to the touch.
    “I’m not feelin’ good, Mum,” the girl admitted.
    “Come on, then. I’ll get ye to bed and get ye some soup to warm ye,” the woman said, taking Brennilee by the wrist.
    “But the chickens …”
    “The chickens’ll get theirs after ye’re warm in yer bed,” Merry Cowsenfed started to say, turning back with a wide, warm smile for her daughter.
    Her smile evaporated when she saw on the little girl’s arm a rosy spot encircled by a white ring.
    Merry Cowsenfed composed herself quickly for her daughter’s sake, and brought the arm up for closer inspection. “Did ye hurt yerself, then?” she asked the girl, and there was no mistaking the hopeful tone of her question.
    “No,” Brennilee replied, and she moved her face closer, too, to see what was so interesting to her mother.
    Merry studied the rosy spot for just a moment. “Ye go to bed now,” she instructed. “Ye pull only the one sheet over ye, so that ye’re not overheatin’ with the little fever ye got.”
    “Am I going to get sicker?” Brennilee asked innocently.
    Merry painted a smile on her face. “No, ye’ll be fine, me girl,” she lied, and she knew indeed how great a lie it was! “Now get ye to bed and I’ll be bringing ye yer soup.”
    Brennilee smiled. As soon as she was out of the room, Merry Cowsenfed collapsed into a great sobbing ball of fear.
    She’d have to get the Falidean town healer to come quickly and see the girl. She reminded herself repeatedly that she’d need a wiser person than she to confirm her suspicion, that it might be something altogether different: a spider bite or a bruisefrom one of the sharp rocks that Brennilee was forever scrambling across. It was too soon for such terror, Merry Cowsenfed told herself repeatedly.
    Ring around the rosy
.
    It was an old song in Falidean town, as in most of the towns of Honce-the-Bear.
    It was a song about the plague.

Was the victory worth the cost?
    It pains me even to speak those words aloud, and, in truth, the question seems to reflect a selfishness, an attitude disrespectful to the memory of all those who gave their lives battling the darkness that had come to Corona. If I wish Elbryan back alive—and Avelyn and so many others—am I diminishing their sacrifice? I was there with Elbryan, joined in spirit, bonded to stand united against the demon dactyl that had come to reside in the corporeal form of Father Abbot Markwart. I watched and felt Elbryan’s spirit diminish and dissipate into nothingness even as I witnessed the breaking of the blackness, the destruction of Bestesbulzibar
.
    And I felt, too, Elbryan’s willingness to make the sacrifice, his desire to see the battle through to the only acceptable conclusion, even though that victory, he knew, would take his life. He was a ranger, trained by the Touel’alfar, a servant and protector of mankind, and those tenets demanded of him responsibility and the greatest altruism
.
    And so he died contented, in the knowledge that he had lifted the blackness from the Church and the land
.
    All our lives together, since I had returned to Dundalis and found Elbryan, had been lives of willing sacrifice, of risk taking. How many battles did we fight, even though we might have avoided them? We walked to the heart of the dactyl, to Mount Aida in the Barbacan, though we truly believed that to be a hopeless road, though we fully expected that all of us would die, and likely in vain, in our attempt to battle an evil that seemed so very far beyond us. And yet we went. Willingly. With hope, and with the understanding that we had to do this thing, whatever the cost,