Chapter 954: Mad Dash (Part Three)
The arrows from below were proving to be an even greater threat than she’d feared since her armor struggled to protect her from someone standing directly beneath her and for a moment, Heila had to refocus her assault of snowballs on the men on the walls. She couldn’t spare the time to aim them, but the cries of pain and frantic shouting to raise shields told her that she’d achieved at least some success... but then Loman’s arrow came.
Unlike the devastating bolt that had nearly killed Lord Jalal, this arrow was smaller, and dimmer, but still more than deadly enough to kill a tired witch. Heila threw herself sideways, but between juggling her spells to reach the tower and fend off the archers below, her exhausted evasion just wasn’t fast enough to escape Loman’s arrow.
-THUNK!-
The luminous arrow struck her squarely in the head, its radiant point meeting the armored leather of her War Hat with a sound like a hammer striking an anvil. For a terrifying moment, Heila felt the arrow’s energy trying to burn through Jacques’s masterwork protection, but the Thornback Alligator hide held firm, refusing to yield to the uncanny sharpness of the divine, luminous arrow.
The impact still knocked her head back, leaving her disoriented and seeing stars as it sent her tumbling through the air. Her concentration had completely shattered, and without her sustained focus, both of the spells she’d channeled through Snow Fang unraveled. Heila tumbled nearly twenty feet before she managed to regain control of her magic, gasping as she struggled to create new snowflake footing beneath her hooves.
She was close now, only a few dozen paces from the stone walls of the keep itself. For a moment, Heila abandoned her focus on gaining height, now that she was over the fortress wall and within the keep’s bailey she could afford to be low to the ground for a few moments, and instead she dashed through the air toward the wall of the tower itself, forcing Loman to lean out over the rampart and fire straight down if he wanted any chance of hitting her with another of his luminous arrows.
One final luminous arrow streaked past her before she reached the wall of the tower and began climbing higher in the sky, but with its passage, she realized something else about the arrow that had struck her. The moment the first arrow struck her War Hat, her mind had gone blank not only from the impact, but from the overwhelming fear that the arrow would do to her what it had done to Lord Jalal when it tore his arm from his body.
But the arrow that struck her was several times weaker than the one that nearly claimed Lord Jalal’s life, and the one that had nearly missed her was much the same. She thought she’d underestimated him when she realized that he could still fire his Bow of Stars even while sustaining the rain of luminous arrows on the west gate plaza, but now, she wasn’t so certain.
Was he splitting his power between the two forms of sorcery? Or was the rain of arrows taking a toll on him that was rapidly weakening him? For a moment, Heila was tempted to play a game of cat and mouse with the Lothian Lord, allowing him to wear himself out with his own sorcery, but she discarded the notion as quickly as it came.
In the distance, she could hear crashing from the gatehouse of the keep along with the anguished cries of soldiers dying as they tried to defend it. Dame Sybyll was close to penetrating the keep’s defenses herself and there was no time to waste if Heila was going to capture Loman alive.
Extending her senses across the bailey, Heila smiled as she discovered a small grove of trees that were nearly as old as the keep itself. Kept as a private reserve for the baron’s own table, a section of the bailey held walnut, apple, plum, and even hazelnut trees.
Fruit trees were generous and giving by nature, and they offered up their energy freely when Heila reached out to them, providing not only the energy she needed to renew her race against Dame Sybyll to the top of Loman’s tower, but a gentle nourishment that helped to replenish her body and clearing her increasingly sluggish and exhausted thoughts.
Her joy at receiving a boon from Baron Hanrahan’s own fruit trees withered and died moments later when she finally burst above the tower’s ramparts. The sight that greeted her eyes was more horrifying than anything she’d imagined in her rush to confront the Lothian lord... and she finally understood both the source of his tremendous power and why it seemed to be failing him the longer the battle went on.
Standing atop the tower, Heila found not only a black-robed Loman Lothian, holding his glittering Bow of Stars, but twelve more men dressed in the plain white robes with gold collars that marked them as temple acolytes.
Or at least, there had been twelve of them. Seven of those men now lay dead, their faces gaunt and pale, contorted in expressions of pain, fear, regret and loss. Their final moments had clearly been anything but reverent as Loman’s sorcery consumed their lives like kindling for the bonfire that burned at the center of the tower.
The remaining five men stood rigidly where they’d been positioned, forming the points of a constellation that Heila recognized as The First Hunter and humans called The Ascended Archer. The place where each man stood shimmered with a pale white light, like dozens of twinkling stars, and faint glowing lines ran across the stones of the tower to connect each man to the sorcery that was even now raining down radiant arrows on the west gate plaza.
But not a single strand of that life consuming magic connected to Loman Lothian. The disciple of Exemplar Domas Onaitis stood alone with his Bow of Stars, offering nothing to the powerful sorcery that had claimed the lives of five acolytes on the tower and who knew how many human soldiers and Eldritch warriors in the west gate plaza.
"You monster!" Heila shouted as her cloven hooves touched the cold stones of the tower roof at last. "How could you do this to your own people!"