Angharad of Llyr is heir to a matriarchy: a line of enchantress-queens that has ruled her island for centuries. Her destiny from birth: to rule as sole authority and ensure that her powerful bloodline endures for another generation. Devoted to her p...
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On earth, the spellbook dictated, fire is a living thing: like all life, it breathes; it consumes that which lived or once did; it grows; and if it does not do these things it dies.
But the fire beneath the earth is different. Beneath the crushing weight of airless stone it breathes not, yet it burns; it has no fuel, yet consumes the solid rock; it has nowhere to go, yet it grows, pushes forward, creates its own relentless paths. It is, in fact, a different element than its counterpart above; it is of the earth itself, an element that would be inaccessible to those who have no affinity for it - except that it burns. It burns, and fire is a power that crosses boundaries.
Every night, Angharad stood upon the ritual tower, clasping the hands of her mother and aunt in the triad once again, their spirits far from the physical reality of their joined figures; their minds roaming within the bedrock of their island, seeking out the faults, the fragmentations, the areas whose heated turmoil drew their related magic as a magnet draws iron filings. When they found a flaw it took their combined power to push the flame back, for the alien fire did not respond willingly, and a malevolent will lurked like a shadow behind it, driving it always to new fissures, to alternate entries, though whether this presence was aware of their having engaged in the battle was impossible to discern.
It was noxious, this fire; it smelt and tasted of metal and sulphur, it was hard-edged as crystal, thick and viscous like tar; its colors were livid, roiling with an ugly light that illuminated nothing. Angharad hated it; it felt not at all kin to the sparking, thrilling, crackling element she knew, the soaring, brilliant waves of light and heat that responded to her as effortlessly as her own limbs did. But this was not fire; it was fire's bastard cousin, banned from the records, ignored, and then showing up on the doorstep demanding recognition, birthing pandemonium. Had she a choice she would have had nothing to do with it.
Yet it must be engaged, and engage it they did, slowly, agonizingly, driving it from one fault and then another, and the rock cooled and solidified in its wake. She wondered if the resulting scars were as strong as they should be, whether they were merely leaving weak points for further exploitation, but there was nothing else to be done; they had no power over earth, beyond the ability of fire and water to shape it - and introducing water into these fault-lines would be disastrous.
The damage, though bad enough, had turned out to be less extensive than they had feared; the vision that had shown them such total destruction had been, apparently, a worst-case prediction. The castle itself, and the land immediately surrounding it, was solid and safe for miles; it was the east and southeast coastline that were bearing the brunt of the attack, which only served to confirm Regat's suspicions of the source of it. Night after night, region by region, they explored, in spirit, places it would have gained them nothing to visit in body; Angharad, spent and exhausted after these sessions, returned to her chambers almost senseless and slept long past sunrise. Whether it was doing any good, she could not say; tremors ceased in one area only to begin in another; every other day, grave messages arrived at the castle: seven more fallen to the illness in the river valley; another fish kill in the harbor; dead gulls found by the hundreds, littering an eastern beach; sheep lying unmarked but dead in the morning after a silent and unsuspecting night; everywhere, the whispers growing to anxious murmurings; what is it; what is happening; send help.
