Nightlord: Orb Read Online Free PDF

to me as if I were an invader.  Some reflex action directed a massive amount of power at me; my entry was similar to sticking a pin in a tiger.  The moment it touched me, in the instant it reached for me to destroy me, it also knew me—knew me as though I were a part of it, a long-lost piece of the stone itself, and the destructive wave of energy vanished into a warm glow of well-being.  It accepted me.
    I say “it accepted me,” but it wasn’t a conscious decision.  It was an automatic reaction, both the attack and its sudden halt.  No one was in the stone with me.  There was only me and a sense of presence.  Nothing more.
    The place was empty, aside from the feeling I wasn’t alone.  It was just a feeling.
    I stretched out, occupying my new and hopefully temporary body.  It was a huge mountain, yes, but that was barely a beginning.  It reached north, south, and west, occupying much of the Eastrange, and laid down long streamers of stone beyond, into and across Rethven.  A thin line stretched eastward, as though seeking after something.  I could feel it like I could feel my skin, sense the passage of feet and hooves, wheels and runners, the flow of water, the movement of air.  It was vast; I was vast.  We were shaped by necessity and desire, guided by the warm thoughts of the other one—Tort?  Probably Tort—and in thousands of little ways by the touch of hands and minds.
    Deep beneath me—that is, deep beneath Karvalen proper—I could feel the burning heart of the mountain, deeper than ever before, buried under more and more stone as the mountain grew downward, sinking its roots into the world.
    It was my mountain.  I knew it in that moment, all of it, understood it completely, and I loved it.  I was it.
    I don’t know how long I spent being part of the stone, a living piece of the world.  My reverie was broken by a flare of power directed at me.  I recognized it as a spell closely akin to the one I used to communicate with the mountain, long ago.  It was a message in a spell, slowed down to match the pace of a living piece of rock.
    I couldn’t understand it.  It was playing the message at a rate appropriate for a piece of living geology, far too slow for me.  Which begged the question of how I was thinking if I didn’t have a brain?  Silicon?  Piezoelectric crystals in neural patterns?  Silver strands for nerve connections and semiconductor metals for neurons?  Did the mountain have these things already, or was it forming them because I was inside it?  Would it retain and use such things after I left?  Or was there some other, less physical explanation?
    With some effort, I narrowed my focus of attention, zeroing in on the place where the message spell originated.  I could feel the containment diagram in that room, high up, under the peak of the mountain, with T’yl still standing next to the wall.  He touched the wall, monitoring the message spell’s progress.  I couldn’t see him, but I could feel his presence.
    I put some feedback into the spell.  T’yl jerked his hand away from the wall; this caused him to fade somewhat from my awareness.  He was still there, but ghostly, less definite.
    A moment later, he came back into focus, so to speak, and I heard him.
    “Are you in there?”
    “I am.”  I’m not sure how we spoke, but I think he simply projected thoughts through a magical filter.  When I projected back at him, he heard me.
    “Then it worked.  Good.  Tort is on her way to deal with your doppelganger.  Tianna is working with Beltar and Seldar to try and suppress the uprising, assuming this works.”
    “Uprising?”
    “You were a great king,” T’yl told me, “because you knew your limits and used people who were better than you.  Your doppelganger insists—insisted—on ruling absolutely, which has given Tyma an enormous amount to work with regarding tyrants.”
    “…and?”
    “She has been your worst enemy—your other you.  If he had ever