The Golden Shield of IBF by Jerry Ahern, Sharon Ahern Page A

from Al’An’s foeman.
    Something happened.
    Swan had experienced the phenomenon only once before, when she was but a girl. Powerless to act because there was no time, her mother refusing to act a moment earlier, Swan witnessed a horse and its rider attempting to outrun an avalanche on the far side of a valley in the high mountain snows. The feeling was as if time itself slowed, moving only imperceptibly forward, allowing the incident which was occurring to be viewed in the most minute detail.
    The grenade rolled from the evil one’s grasp. The flat thing attached to it like a handle, which she had seen earlier with her second-sight, sprang away from the grenade.
    Swan saw Al’An’s eyes, wide with horror. She heard a solitary scream. It was Alicia’s voice, Swan thought. Around the evil one’s finger was the ring which had been attached to the grenade as she’d second-sighted him.
    Somehow, Swan knew that this combination of circumstances was very bad.
    Al’ An shouted, “Get to cover! Everybody!” Al’An pushed to his feet. His foeman grasped Al’An’s right foot. Al’An shook free, kicking his foeman in the side of the face.
    Al’An lunged toward the grenade, looking toward Swan for an eyeblink. And their gazes met. In Al’An’s beautiful brown eyes, Swan saw two things revealed, that somehow Al’An cared for her more deeply than anyone had ever cared for her, and that he knew that he was about to die.
    The grenade thing was a bomb.
    The spell that she had happened upon before the attack by her mother’s forces, a spell to be used against the power of a volcano, to turn it back against itself—Swan recalled it now, shrieking the words as she cast it. It was untried by her. What if it did not work?
    She sheathed her sword.
    In the same breath as the first spell, Swan began to recite the incantation which had brought her here, but totally backwards, sound for sound, rune for rune.
    Swan’s arms stretched out, hands grasping for the powerful magic she had felt in the air around her here since she first arrived. The magical energy pulsed through her limbs, spiraling into the very core of her body.
    Swan walked the few spans separating her from Al’An, her palms pressed together between her breasts, the magical energy filling her, one with her.
    Swan dropped to her knees beside Al’An, his body tented over the grenade, shielding all from its deadliness at the sacrifice of his own life. In truth, Al’An was a brave and noble champion, the Champion foretold in the Prophecies of Mir. The deadly little bomb was about to make its evil felt, unless her untried spell succeeded. She could not risk Al’An’s life if it failed.
    Magical energy flowed from Swan’s hands as she turned them open, her arms folding around Al’An’s upper body, drawing his head to her breast.
    The energy crackled and arced, coursed wildly through their bodies. Her very being shuddered with its force.
    There was a roar, not from the bomb, but a roar of thunder, cracking, tearing through the magical fabric of the universe.
    In the same eyeblink that the grenade exploded, so did the energy which flowed from within Swan and Al’An, a light glowing whiter than the brightest sunlight, enveloping them. The liquid darkness came again, then was gone. A snowflake touched Swan’s cheek, another settled in Al’An’s eyelashes. He stared up at her in silence, his head still clutched to her bosom. Another snowflake landed on the tip of her nose and Al’An brushed it away with his hand...

    Eran, Sorceress Queen of Creath, Mistress General of the Horde of Koth, shrieked with a pain she had not known since childbirth. She stood. The gem-encrusted goblet from which an instant earlier she’d sipped red wine flew from her ring-festooned fingers, hurtling across the banquet table, skipping over the flagstones of the Great Hall of Koth.
    Her lover for the night, obedient enough to retain human form if he kept his manners, dragged himself