The Gathandrian Trilogy 02 - Hallsfoots Battle

they find the courage to fight against the mind-executioner after this?
    She felt a touch at the edge of her mind like a small sharp needle prodding her for a response, and glanced around to see where it came from. It tasted of fear and unknowing.
    A moment later, she knew who it was and almost fell again to the scorched earth.
    The First Elder. He knelt close to her, his hands touching his face as if trying to remove a mask.
    His eyes were no longer there.
    Before she could stop it, give herself time to build up any veneer of strength, all the First Elder’s pain and darkness rushed in upon her, and she sensed his agonies as if each one were her own. There was no light within him, not a physical light and not even a mind one. Not a simple darkness either. No, it pressed into him and burned his aged skin so he could scarcely breathe. His arms pushed out in front of him, as if seeking a light hidden in shadow, but there was nothing beyond the pain. His eyes were burning, burning. When he touched them, the pain drove its knife deeper, searing a trail of crimson and black like old blood, into his thoughts.
    He groaned aloud and then, thank the gods and stars, the link between them shattered. The noise of his groaning was somewhere between a child and a dying animal. Along with this, words of denial, over and over again, formed a barrier around him in a meaningless attempt to keep the truth at bay.
    The strange fire had blinded him, Annyeke knew it. Not only his eyes, but there were parts of his thoughts he could no longer find, the things in his life he still held dear, no matter what he had done—friendship, vocation, and love.
    When he fell to the earth, panting hard, she caught him and lifted him up. He was as slight as the air itself, almost as if his enforced period of meditation and prayer had taken away his flesh as the fire had taken away his eyes. She called for water, sensing the presence of Johan behind her. Then a flurry of wings and something soft drifted through her hair. Behind it a whole world of power and peace—the snow-raven. It had brought the First Elder here from his hilltop sanctuary when they needed him most, and how she was glad of it. But, most important of all in the rediscovery of the cane and the bird, where were Simon and Gelahn?
    No space to answer these questions, even if she knew how, as the First Elder began to speak.
    “My eyes,” he whispered. “All is darkness. What is happening? I cannot tell anything, I cannot…”
    “Hush, hush there,” Annyeke did not know what else to say. Some things were too cruel for the telling.
    Johan knelt, placed a beaker at the First Elder’s lips—the gods alone know where he had found it—and the injured Gathandrian gulped down water. His body shook so much that Annyeke felt the echo of it in her own flesh. While he drank, Annyeke told him of the death of the Library, the missing scribe, and the torn and bleeding parchments lying on the earth around them. Her voice no longer sounded like her own. When he heard her words, the First Elder reached out, fingers scrabbling on the soil, trying to connect with the scattered legends so precious to them all.
    “Here,” Johan said. “Here is one of our tales.”
    His hands pressed a scrap of parchment into the First Elder’s palm and she smiled her gratitude at Johan. Something in the darkness inside the Elder lightened a little.
    There was something else. Important words the First Elder was trying to remember, the shadow of which she could sense from the physical contact between them—a fact he longed to tell her that had been revealed to him in the Library, or perhaps earlier than that, from his meditations. She did not know. The effort of it seared his thoughts, slid away from the thinness of his mind as if wary of causing harm. She opened her mouth to reassure him, tell him to rest. Whatever he knew could surely wait till later, for what more could come upon them now that had not already torn the hearts from them all? But the First Elder spoke before she could.
    “A-Annyeke,” he stammered and at once she leaned closer to his lips, trying to hear what he was determined to say.
    “Yes, First Elder.”
    “Please, I…” Words would not come but, there in his mind, she saw a glimpse of something long and dark. Then the image was gone and the Elder let forth a cry, half frustration, half despair.
    Annyeke blinked, and looked across the smouldering embers and scattered parchment.
    “The