Wheel of Fate

Mist had begun to settle on the battlefield as two warriors faced each other. Gurku, the larger of the two, was shaking in his boots. Ambergrove in his time was a world where his people were often unmatched. Standing head and shoulders taller than even the tallest of forest dwarves, Gurku was considered small still—as far as giants were concerned. He was certainly a brawny man, and some of his human fellows who talked of earth compared him to something called a Neanderthal or an Andre. One thing he knew for sure, as he stood and stared at the enemy before him, was that hill giants were supposed to be tough. Fearless. Especially with the Earthers’ unparalleled guns for weapons, Gurku shouldn’t be afraid of anything. But those grey eyes staring back at him were filled with the smoke that only came with dragon fire. Looking at the fire-haired woman, he would have thought her capable of transforming into a dragon and burning him to a crisp. He’d heard stories of the southern raiders, but nothing compared to the real thing. Gurku barely had time to bring his rifle up to parry or to roll out of the way before she came at him again. She was human-sized, meaty and strong. Her hair was collected neatly into a bun in an iron cage. She wore purple and blue chainmail like that of the sea elves, and it was rumored that she had defeated the sea elves’ champion when she was only sixteen. He believed it. The fiercest thing about her wasn’t the rumor of her deeds or her stern appearance. It wasn’t even the way her eyes burned when she swung her weapon at him. It was how she swung her weapon. The giant hammer she wielded seemed to be too large for someone of her size to bear. She didn’t have the burly strength a man might—even a human man. It was sheer, impossible rage that allowed her to swing hard and true. She let out a battle shout with every swing, and every swing became harder to evade. She moved with such fervor her hair burst free of its cage and whipped wildly about as she swung. “This is for Kip!” she screamed, whipping the hammer upward into Gurku’s jaw with enough force to shatter the bone and send him to the ground, stunned. He blinked away stars, and he saw her hammer coming down toward his face before he saw no more. § Mara panted and rested Kip’s hammer on the ground. She wiped the spattered mud and filth off her face and collected the fallen bun cage, wrapping and binding her hair neatly in it as she surveyed the area around her. A human, two goblins, and now a giant lay still on the battlefield. Four more of Gaele’s people who will not spread her dream further than this land, she thought bitterly, looking down at the ringed hand that held Kip’s hammer. It had been three months since her grandmother, the self-proclaimed Great Harbinger, had ordered her men to kill Kip with just a simple clap of her hands. Mara’s eighteenth birthday came and went, and she learned that birthdays were not something celebrated in Ambergrove—the last birthday celebration, when Kip had orchestrated a lovely dinner and found a way for her to play DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, was all due to the gnome’s love for her. She had grown to love Kip, too, so strongly that just weeks before he died they had talked about becoming lifemates. His death left a bad taste in her mouth. Someone has to die for a Ranger trial to be completed. That’s what she was told. But they hadn’t completed it. If anything, they seemed to have gotten further from completing it as the months wore on. When Mara had seen that the leader of the scourge in Chaosland—known to the rest of the world as the forbidden lands—was none other than her grandmother, she was sure in that moment that she was going to lose her uncle Teddy. Teddy, like Gaele, was a full-blooded forest dwarf. Unlike Gaele, Teddy had raised Mara’s father, Toren, to be a good man—until he left Ambergrove for a life on Earth with Mara’s mother. Gaele’s hatred for her brother surely should have won out, but no. Mara ran those words over and over in her mind. I, too, have little men who would do anything to protect me. She was evil, plain and simple. It would have given Gaele great satisfaction to order the death of her brother, but that wasn’t the goal of that whole meeting. The goal was to break Mara to awaken her chaos. Kip had moved ever so slightly to place himself between Mara and Gaele when the old woman had threatened her. He was the one who tried to protect her, so he had been killed. What a curse love had been. I’ve got news for you, Gaele, she thought, I’m destroying your chaos. I am. And I will continue to destroy your chaos until there’s none of it left. You’ve taken him, but you won’t take me. As Mara spat at the ground in defiance, her uncle’s angry, horrified cursing met her ears.