It was perhaps only thirty seconds after he was violently plucked from the ground and carried off, feeling much like a sack of overripe turnips, that a very startled Brokk was set back down somewhat more gently. His head spun a little, his vision blurred and steadying only slowly, but there was no mistaking the sight of Embla sprinting into battle after that slippery halfling friend of theirs.
Similarly unmistakable was Isolde`s predicament, as her stunned body bounced to a stop with the splash of blood on her temple, the dire wolf already moving in for the kill. Brokk heard a throaty rumble halfway between a growl and a roar escape the beast as it opened its jaws wide around Isolde`s head.
When it let out a confused yelp and suddenly hurtled past the fallen Isolde, all four paws off the ground, Brokk corrected himself: he heard a throaty rumble halfway between a growl and a roar escape Embla. She had been going too fast to stop and simply collided with the dire wolf, with her considerable bulk easily knocking it off-balance for the second such ignominious time. The immediate mortal danger having passed, she crouched protectively over Isolde, drawing a sword nearly as large the halfling and snarling incomprehensible words in her own language.
As the dire wolf scrabbled back upright, Aidan tried to close the distance between them, just a second too late to strike at his foe. The terrible jaws did now close over a head, but it was a head of Gemullean steel set atop a neck of fire-hardened Anarian ironwood. There was no finer example of the smith`s art in Fisherman`s Solace - any more than there had been in Arden, or Tanner`s Rest, or Mavarra. Aidan gripped his warhammer all the more tightly as the dire wolf pulled at it with short sharp jerks of terrifying force, threatening to disarm him.
To the untrained eye, the battle had now passed beyond stalemate, when in fact it had only just reached this point. Brokk could see that if Embla moved closer, hoping to strike at the dire wolf`s exposed flank, it would simply end its contest with Aidan and dart around to savage Isolde before anyone could save her. Similarly, even if Aidan pulled his weapon free, it would leave him momentarily off-balance and thus just as vulnerable as at the start of battle. As things stood, in fact, this stalemate was a marked improvement over either their first storm-lashed meeting with this enemy, or even the way that this encounter had started!
So far, the only one of them who had not yet been tested against the dire wolf was Brokk himself. Mere weeks ago, he would not have hesitated to unleash a storm of his own, a storm of fire and ice and thunder that might shatter fortress walls and lay waste to entire city districts if not controlled and directed by his will.
He was not the wizard he had been 'mere weeks ago', however. The powers he had drawn upon to destroy the monstrous artifact hidden beneath Arden, powers drawn out of said artifact, had hollowed him. 'Hollowed', yes indeed, was the most appropriate word for how he felt in his waking hours.
Once he had known what it was to be young, even in those forgotten days after crawling from the wreckage of his hold, ten thousand accusing voices of dead dwarves at his back, his body shrivelling under the weight of accumulating centuries beyond any dwarven lifespan, his ambition and pride blasted to oblivion by the relic he had sought to cheat of its secrets.
Once, but no more. Now he felt every day of his extreme age. Exhaustion plagued him, seemingly irremovable by either rest or any spell he knew. His grasp of magic fluctuated more erratically than gnomish opinion, and some days he did not even feel able to cast the simplest of cantrips.
It was the third great wound he had suffered. The first he had almost learned to live with, and he took a measure of solace from his continued study of the relic that had punished his arrogance so long ago. The second, received in the catacombs below Mavarra (and still he could hear the Flayer`s laughter in his dreams!), had only just started to scab over. Brokk did not know how many more such injuries he could take before one became fatal.
*****
"You will be the one to set her free." Brokk jumped, startled out of his bleak thoughts by the oracle`s pronouncement, the true ring of prophecy in his voice. "The wolf girl has fled before and beneath a dream, a wolf dream. Yet she is not your enemy, nor even the wolf dream, but another. It is there, hidden from both, the spawn of hate and lust conjoined."
For some seconds, the dwarf stared in silence, fighting against the urge to ask questions that would lead to useless answers, or worse, to answers that could distract from understanding. Then he knew that there was only one question he needed to ask.
"What must I do to set her free?"
"The fiend must be cast out from them. She and she and she must be made separate, not Three-Who-Are-One. With one gone, the two can rest at last. The wolf dream will end. The wolf girl will awaken forever. You must cast out the fiend, send it to the Hell it belongs to. You will see how to do this. The stone will show you."
Brokk understood what he was being asked to do. He understood that this might be the next great wound he would have to suffer, perhaps the last he would be able to suffer. Carefully, his every joint creaking and aching, he knelt down and scraped a rune in the dirt. It was one that had many meanings, depending on the context, and in its position relative to others when scribed or carved. On its own, however, it had but a single meaning: self-sacrifice.
He reached into his greatcoat, into the only pocket that mattered, and brought out the stone tablet within. He placed it atop his improvised rune and ran his hand gently over its timeless surface. The words it bore, their meaning older than the world itself, would have shone with some mystical glow in a bard`s tale, a memory of the pure light that gave birth to the gods who made it. In real life, they stayed exactly as they were. Relic from the dawn of time or not, it was still just stone, and stone was not given to such theatrics.
Yet this stone, at least, was given to other things. Certainly things like the concept of fairness, on behalf of which it had barely permitted Brokk to survive the backlash that had annihilated his hold, and perhaps more? He did not know. He did hope, however, and hope was a thing to be cherished.
Brokk felt not in the least bit idiotic as he addressed the tablet: "My friends need me. I cannot help them without you. Exact your price on me, tenfold and more if you must, but lend me what they need. Please. Do not let me fail those I love once more."
He closed his eyes and leaned forward, completing his prostration by touching his forehead to the tablet. He knew the spell he needed, or at least the underlying theory of what it entailed. In its classical form, it required the spellcaster to present an item that was inimical to the target. With such a vague descriptor of what the target actually was, Brokk would need to present something more esoteric as part of the abjuration and simply hope that that would be sufficient.
Long ago, he had learned what it meant to hate oneself more keenly than any other thing, to loathe the insatiable lust for knowledge that had brought about his fall from grace. Hardly akin to the 'spawn of hate and lust conjoined' that he been told he was supposed to banish, but it had given him an idea as to what sufficiently esoteric thing he would use. Even the most uninspired bard would be disgusted if they had shared his thoughts. Friendship and love? May as well try to duel the Dark Walker with happy thoughts and a cheerful attitude!
Kneeling there, furious combat raging so close by, Brokk felt the turbulence of his thoughts settle. Words appeared in his mind with the warm feeling of sun after a thunderstorm. What worry he had that the magic would be beyond him melted away and he started to speak the words. Beneath his head, the ancient stone tablet shuddered once, almost imperceptibly, but it was enough to let him know it, or whatever benevolent god still kept a watch over it, had accepted his plea.
Brokk knew he was smiling as the ritual gathered power. It was not exactly professional, but very few parts of his adult life could be considered model examples of wizardly behaviour. His friends were before him, their lives in his hands and in his speech, and he owed them everything that had been good since his fall. Even Isolde would never dream of collecting this debt, which made him all the more willing to repay it now.
His aches were gone. His weariness was gone. He sat upright and felt young again - no, for this moment, he was young again, with that spark in his eyes and that sheen in his beard (his beard? Ah, how he had missed that staple of dwarvendom!) that he had been without for years. The last syllable passed through his lips. Light from another world burst out from his eyes, carrying with it Brokk`s love for his friends, leaping the gap between him and the monster in dire wolf form that menaced them.
Then he was the Brokk of today again, and exhaustion rose up to claim him once more. His sight remained clear long enough to see the light strike envelope the dire wolf and sink into its body. He did not see it released its hold on Aidan`s warhammer, or the half-elf nearly fall backwards in shock as the beast began to convulse violently, its flesh warping and bulging as some tremendous battle raged just beneath the surface. By then, he was already unconscious.
*****
Aidan and Embla were warriors experienced enough to keep track of their surroundings and maintain a heightened awareness of their position relative to everyone and everything else at a glance. They understood that the sudden burst of light must have come from Brokk, but it was no spell they had ever seen from him before, and his lack of any warning cry or further advice meant that he must have collapsed after casting it.
Whatever he had done, it was a frightening display. For nearly a minute, the dire wolf contorted and writhed impossibly. Spasms wracked its flesh, occasionally tearing a bloodless hole from which a dark light oozed into the air. A trio of voices came from its throat, only one of which belonged to the terrified animal itself.
The others were engaged in a violent argument across a dozen languages, the softer of the two always reverting to a faintly musical speech that somehow reminded Aidan and Embla of their own languages as well as each other`s. There was a subtle harshness in some syllables that made the inherent musicality similar to Rhunsdhain, but the rhythm of the language and even whole words felt far closer to Embla`s own speech than to Aidan`s.
It was an analysis the pair did not have long to perform. As quickly as it had started, the dire wolf stopped its involuntary spasms. One second passed, two, three, and four. Then it exploded into a hail of fur and bone and flesh. A sphere of golden light hovered above the remains, an airborne cage for a nightmare horror of red eyes and black tentacles that still raged in a dozen languages, its tone now more fearful than hateful as the banishment neared completion.
The sphere brightened, contracted, and faded from existence, taking its prisoner with it to whichever Hell was responsible for it. As its afterglow faded, the image of an ethereal barbarian girl became visible. Tears of unbridled joy wound their way down her cheeks as she laughingly, disbelievingly, examined her human shape.
Asta endrem! Asta endrem! her softer, musical yet mighty voice called out. Niklaus! Bifask, Niklaus Hofvarilli, thuvi Asta Hildolfmeyla leidha dir! Bifask!
Uttering a savage howl that would have made a true wolf proud, the ghost of Asta, freed at last from her cursed prison of lupine flesh, rose into the sky and vanished. Dumbstruck by this sequence of events, those watching very nearly missed the final performance. Brokk might have warned them, but he could not. With the fiendish entity that had bound Asta into wolf form departed, and Asta herself divided from the wolf dream that had been her unnaturally extended life for over three centuries, the last portion of this triad was also given liberty - the liberty to pursue a life free of fiend and Asta both.
The mangled flesh of its earthly form twitched and pulsed. Bones knit themselves back together. Blood trickling into the earth flowed back into the meat. The last rent in the skin healed over. An eyelid flicked open, then another. Three hundred years of experiences settled themselves into memory. A very tired, very confused dire wolf picked herself up and looked around with eye and ear and nose.
There were many two-feet around her, and smoke-scent. Also water. This was important. She was very thirsty. She did not have any pain. She remembered that there had been a lot of pain. This was good. But there were still many two-feet, and smoke-scent. There was water in the hills. There was water in the forests. She knew them all. She did not need to fight two-feet to drink water.
Two-feet did not taste good, anyway. She showed her teeth at the nearest two-feet, to show she was strong. One was a very big two-feet with a very big not-claw and was standing over a very small two-feet. Maybe a cub. A mother protecting a cub? Definitely important to not fight that if she did not need to!
The two-feet were smart. They did not move closer. She walked away from them, ears watching just in case. The hills were close. Water and shade would be there. Something else too, she did not yet know. It was in the future. A thought she did not understand exactly. The thought was a gift, a comfortable thing she also did not understand exactly. Memories from the two-feet cub dream, perhaps. The future would be good if she made it good.
She was intelligent enough to understand that.