Chapter 213: The One Who Slew the Elder

For a long moment, nothing moved.

Not the horde.

Not the Grand Magus, still speaking his low, heavy words on the far side of the Span.

Not the eight thousand people standing on the southern bank of the Riven, watching.

Encrid stood at the end of the bridge with his sword lowered and the black line fading slowly from the air in front of him.

It did not vanish all at once. It thinned, the way a scratch on glass seems to thin when the light moves. Then it was a thread. Then it was nothing. And the air where it had been was only air again, cold and damp from the river below.

Somewhere far beneath him, the Riven roared on, white over black rocks, as it had roared for a thousand years.

It did not care what had just fallen into it.

The Slumbering Elder of the Great Green was dead.

The thing that Ulrich Vance had walked into the forest to fight, and died fighting. The thing that Garrick Dane had struck twice and been crushed for it. The thing that had broken the Wall. The thing that the Wall’s own builders had said could not be stopped. One of the five things the Wall had never been built for.

It was dead.

And it had been killed by a disgraced fourth son of the Gannon family, who had been an Ascendant with one Star sixty seconds ago.

? ? ?

Encrid did not feel triumphant.

He had expected to. Somewhere in the back of his mind, during all those nights on the Wall, he had imagined what it would feel like to see the Elder fall. He had imagined it the way a boy imagines winning a battle. Shouting. Relief. Something bright.

It was not like that.

It felt like standing at the end of a very long road and looking back at everyone who had walked it with him.

He had not killed the Elder alone.

Ulrich Vance had taken its left tusk. Without that, the Elder would have had two wedges instead of one, and the Wall would have fallen three days sooner.

Garrick Dane had cracked its foreleg. It had limped for five days because of him. Slower. Always slower. Every hour it lost was an hour the Wall had kept.

Rael had taken its right eye, and his greatsword had fallen into the Riven with it just now.

And Iolan Vire had climbed its face wrapped in blue fire and burned out the last eye it had. Without that, it would have seen the Span. It would have seen him. It would not have needed a thread to guide it.

Encrid had only finished what they started.

He thought that if the old man had been there, he would have said something plain about it. Something that cut straight through everything else.

Encrid did not know what he would have said.

He wished he could have asked.

There were eight seconds left to the tokens.

He turned his head and looked south, across the Span.

Half a mile away, on the far side of the gorge, the southern bank of the Riven was dark with people. From this distance, they were not people at all. They were a single shape. A long dark line at the edge of the cliff, crowded together, motionless.

He could not see their faces.

He could not tell which of them was Zuri, or Gus, or Ysolde, or Rael.

But near the front of the crowd, a single small figure had raised one arm high above its head. It was not waving. It was simply holding its arm up, straight, toward the sky.

Encrid did not know who it was.

He found that he did not need to.

At the southern end of the bridge, the Grand Magus stood with his eyes closed and his walking stick planted in the stone. His voice had not stopped. It was rougher now. Hoarse. But it went on, low and heavy, word after word, sinking into the stone of the Span.

The old man had not even opened his eyes to watch.

He had trusted Encrid to hold the bridge.

Encrid turned back to the north.

The windows opened, and this time, there was no glitch.

He barely saw them.

[ ? ? ? The Slumbering Elder has been slain ? ? ? ]

[ Title acquired: The One Who Slew the Elder ]

[ Your achievement has been recorded. ]

[ Your Narrative Relevance has increased. ]

[ Narrative Relevance: (Calculating) ]

[ Item acquired: Familiar Seal (Unique) ]

[ Familiar Seal: Bind one creature to your soul as a familiar. Success depends on the target’s strength of will and its condition at the moment of binding. Single use. ]

Encrid looked at them without reading them.

He was tired.

He had not noticed it until now. The Star was still Absolute. The frost was still spreading out from his feet. But underneath it, somewhere very deep, something was beginning to drain away. Like a tide going out.

His hands were shaking on the hilt. He could not remember when they had started.

Five seconds, he thought.

He did not know where the thought came from. He only knew it was true, the way he had known the Elder would jump. The token had a limit, and he could feel the limit coming toward him the way a man in a boat feels the edge of a waterfall before he sees it.

Three seconds.

He lifted his head and looked past the end of the bridge, past the chasm, past the empty place where the Elder had stood, into the horde.

It had gone completely silent.

On the Wall, in nine days of fighting, the horde had never once been silent. It had screamed. It had roared. It had scraped and climbed and howled through every hour of every night.

Now every Roamer on the road and the hills had stopped. They were not fleeing. They were not attacking. They stood exactly where they were, in their tens of thousands, and they did not make a sound.

The silence was worse than any noise Encrid had ever heard.

And then, all at once, every one of them lowered its head to the ground.

As if bowing.

Grinners and Reevers and Lopers. Talljacks, folding their long bodies down until their heads touched the dirt. The last of the Gorehorns, kneeling on their great front legs. All of them. From the edge of the chasm back to the hills and over the hills to the horizon, a sea of lowered heads.

Encrid’s skin went cold.

He had seen soldiers bow like that but not the roamers.

The horde in the middle of the road began to part.

Slowly. Carefully. The way a crowd parts for a king.

Something was walking through it toward the bridge.

And the time given by the tokens had passed.

? ? ?

Magic Castle bonus Chapter. Thank you @Nagii344~