A little over two months ago...
* * * * *
"LOOOOOOOOOOOOOGAN!"
"The Light blind him!" Logan swore, edging further behind the corner of a windswept escarpment. Everything was windswept: the surface of the glaciers were altered on a daily basis, however minute the changes were, and those changes gave this frozen landscape -- if it could rightly be called land -- a bittersweet beauty. Bitter due to the harsh conditions surrounding it; sweet due to the visually stunning appearance of the glaciers, particularly when one approached them from the water. This glacier was the largest of the three, rearing almost six hundred feet above the deep blue below and stretching for a mile or more in any direction, but that was not nearly comfortable enough for Logan. Not when that hope-starved fool Coran was hunting him.
Light, but it was cold! The wind howled around him; it was as if fell creatures of the arctic north were calling to one another across the icy plateau. The sky was overcast, something for which Logan was grateful; there wasn't the chance of snowblindness today. The wind-driven snow had formed a shallow depression where it was blown over the edge of the escarpment, and he had chosen that as his hiding place -- for now. Logan tried not to hug the side of the steep slope too closely, but his plain brown wool clothes, all he had available to him when he fled the port town of Amanar, were very visible here where everything was clad in unrelieved white. He had two choices: endure the cold for however long it took Coran to realize he wasn't going to find his quarry; or die. Or die from the cold.
Logan was liking his chances of making out of this alive less and less.
"LOOOOOOOOOOOOOGAN!" That voice was like thunder; it rolled over the glacial face like a roaring tidal wave, and the frore wind bore it across the breadth of the glacier.
"YOU CAN'T HIDE FOREVER!"
"We'll see about that," Logan muttered, but his heart was not in it. He was fighting a losing battle and he knew it. Despair was unbecoming of a soldier so well-trained, but why delay the inevitable? One question nagged him, however, and perhaps it was that one question that kept him in hiding for another moment, another, and another.
How had that young fool discovered him?
Or a better question might be this: Who had revealed him -- them -- and their purpose?
Logan did not know, but, provided he survived this encounter, he fully intended to find out.
"LOOOOOOOOOOOOOGAN!"
Coran's voice was louder, now. He was getting closer. Logan's heart leapt to his throat: the moment of decision had arrived.
Logan seized the Power, and he decided.
* * * * *
"Mercy!"
Coran stared coldly at the bearded, heavyset man gripping the edge of the glacier with every ounce of strength he could muster. Sometimes the fellow would manage to find enough leverage to get an elbow, then an arm over the chapped lip, but Coran would always nudge the limb back off with the toe of one boot. Despite having seen this occur four times already, surprise continued to faintly flicker around the rim of the Void whenever the man somehow clung to life and sanity and strength, somehow caught himself just before the moment he was certain to fall to his death in the freezing waters below. If he was not battered to death by the jutting ice on the way down.
"Mercy, Coran!" the man named Logan cried -- and he
was crying, Coran saw; the man's tears were freezing almost as quickly as they brimmed in his eyes. Coran had shielded Logan after soundly defeating him, thus depriving him of the use of the Power. "Mercy!" Logan cried again. Without the buffer utilizing the male half of the True Source required, Coran knew that Logan was all too aware of every feeling and emotion coursing through him -- every ounce of fear that pumped alongside every ounce of adrenaline, every drop of sweat that nigh instantaneously froze and flaked from his brow due to the slow, deliberate shaking of his head.
Logan wept openly, but Coran felt no pity. Coran felt nothing; he held the Power, unlike Logan, and its dueling rivers of fire and ice, rivers that coursed through him now as surely as his blood, swept away any emotions and feelings until a clinical awareness was all that was left. Coran's features gave no sign of what he was thinking, but the cold, burning light in those blue, blue eyes filled Logan's heart with fear and regret, wonder and shame, all of which were clearly visible in the desperate man's wide green eyes.
"Where is he, Logan?" Coran asked. His voice sounded as cold and hollow as one of the caves that twisted through the guts of the massive glacier, another effect of the Power's torrential forces being conducted through him.
"W-who?" Logan almost screamed. He had tried to climb up again, and Coran had nudged his arm off again. Logan flailed for a heartbeat and nearly lost his grip, but managed to hold on after tapping into whatever reserves of strength the man had left. There couldn't be much; they had been at this for at least half an hour.
"Your friend Delwynn. Where is he?"
"D-Delwynn? I-I haven't seen him in m-months!"
Coran shook his head. "Wrong answer."
Bringing one foot up, Coran made as if to stomp on Logan's arms and shoulders -- but paused in mid-stomp when Logan frantically, wordlessly begged for another moment of clemency.
"You have something to tell me?" Coran inquired, setting his foot down and leaning forward. Not that he needed to do the latter, as the Power augmented all of his senses. He could have heard Logan if the man whispered his answers.
"Y-yes! By the L-Light, yes! Just l-let me live, Co-Coran!" A new storm of weeping overtook the man whose fingers were turning blue -- black, too, but only here and there. Coran had never experienced frostbite, and would not; he'd had the common sense to weave a thin filter of Air and Fire around himself when he first arrived here, a filter that heated the air around him just enough to keep him perpetually warm. It created an interesting effect: now and then heat shimmers would ripple over him, and the ice beneath his feet periodically exhaled wisps of steam that the wind carried away.
"Then tell me what you have to tell me, Logan. I'm losing what little patience I have remaining."
"A-alright! Alright! D-Delwynn, he's in N-Northern New Dauntless!"
Northern New Dauntless? The flickers of surprise weren't so small this time. Why would a man who could channel venture into a country that feared what it did not understand? Delwynn wasn't renowned for discretion, either. Coran didn't say anything, but he did look at Logan in a way that conveyed more than words could have.
"I-I was su-supposed to re-recruit young m-men who had the s-spark or could be ta-taught! D-Delwynn, he was to co-convince the l-lords in the n-north to re-rebuild their f-fleet! That wo-would gain the i-in-interest of Thessilane! W-we..."
Coran saw where this was going. The renegade channelers wanted to create -- re-create was a better word, really -- tension between the two countries, and possibly others as well. If the entire continent went to war, as their goal seemed to be, there would be a two- to three-front war for every country's government to manage. It would make a coup d'etat effortless. Men who could channel would rule every political body from east to west, and it would be an unmitigated disaster -- if not the end of the world as mankind knew it. Men who could channel had a tendency to go mad after a while and lay waste to everything and everyone in sight, after all.
Coran was no exception.
"B-believe me, Coran," Logan was saying. "W-we are the s-strong! We sh-should do e-ev-everything we can t-to protect these p-people! Under our r-rule, they w-would be s-safe!"
"For how long, Logan?" Coran asked, taking a step closer to the hanging man. "The taint will claim you sooner rather than later, and your comrades are just as susceptible. How long before not only all of you go mad, but before you turn on each other in your madness and destroy yourselves -- and then the world? That is
not protecting the people, Logan. That is your selfish desire for power; that is your craving for a rank and title you do not deserve, not by birth, achievement or force."
"Coran, please! Mercy!"
"No," Coran said, and the volume of the Power within him swelled to the point of pain, to the point where just a sliver more would burn him out -- or kill him. Logan's eyes widened to the size of dinner plates; he could not seize the Power, but he could sense it in Coran. "Your plan would have killed every man, woman and child in the world -- and that would not have been enough. You and your comrades, in a final act of insane rage, would likely try to destroy the world, too.
"For that, Logan, you must die."
"Coran! Coran,
noooooooooooooooo!"
Coran released the shield on Logan -- a fact that did not dawn on the other man until it was too late. The weave of Spirit that comprised the shield was altered so that its became an axe instead, and Coran swung that axe with all his might at Logan's connection to the True Source.
When it severed, Logan screamed -- and let go of the edge.
Coran watched Logan fall to the icy waves below. Logan likely wouldn't survive the impact; the impact combined with the sheer cold of the water would stop the man's heart. Logan had known that, too. Coran supposed that killing yourself now saved you the trouble later, when you finally succumbed to the depression that drained the will to live from any man severed from the Source.
"That's one," Coran said, turning to leave.
"Eleven more to go."