Bryan’s thoughts shifted quickly away from his own troubles to those he feared Rhiannon was now facing. Finding strength in that foul notion, the young half-elf rolled over and forced himself to all fours, then willed himself up to his knees alone, that he might scan the area. All he saw was the carnage that had been Corning, the rubble that had been his home, with no sign at all of the witch, or of the undead monster. Breathing hard from both exertion and pain, Bryan somehow managed to get to his feet. His first attempt at a step ended in an unbalanced stagger to the side, Bryan crashing hard against the remnants of a wall, that stone being the only thing keeping him upright. Again small explosions of pain erupted throughout his body, and again, that creeping, icy coldness reached a bit deeper, a bit closer to his heart.
But he staggered on, from wall to wall, searching every crevice, every nook in the area. So many bones littered the place, but no fresh kills. No Rhiannon.
He believed that if she had escaped, she would have run off to the east, back toward the river and allies, but he went to the west gate first, for that was the direction the wraith would likely have taken her if it had caught her.
The carnage was even worse, the destruction complete, in that area. The great western gate of Corning, so thick and strong, an image of security—false security!—that had emboldened the folk of Corning for so long, had been hit by some unearthly explosion, had been blasted from its massive iron hinges and blasted apart. In staring at the piles and piles of bones, both talon and human, at the rusting weapons and armor, young Bryan could well imagine the mighty struggle. This had been the main surge, the focal point of Corning’s fall, and so the half-elf was not surprised when he happened upon a delicate skeleton, lying amidst a pile of many, many talon bones. In trembling hands, he took the skull, gently, lovingly, and lifted it up before his moistening eyes.
He had known, of course, that Meriwindle, his father, had fallen in the defense of Corning. All logic had told him so; there was no way brave Meriwindle would have left the city while any stood to defend it, and given the massive swarm of talons, no way he could have escaped afterward. But still, Bryan had always held out a little corner of his heart for hope. Perhaps his father had been taken prisoner, he had often silently prayed, or perhaps Meriwindle had run off to the west, to work as his son worked, an independent thorn in the side of the talon army. That was the fantasy that young Bryan held most dear: that his father was alive and fighting in the west, that one day he would meet up with gallant Meriwindle and together they would chase talons all the way back to Mysmal Swamp.
This delicate skull, that of neither a human nor a talon, defeated that fantasy, and all the others, and now young Bryan had to admit in his heart what he had been speaking openly for all these months.
“What thief, Father?” he asked quietly, falling to his knees but keeping the delicate skull steady before his eyes. “What thief has stolen your smooth flesh and drank of your blood? What talon sword or what magic? What carrion bird, what worm? I would strike them down, my father, every one! I would avenge your death, but hollow, I fear, are my words and my efforts.”
Bryan paused and rocked back, black despair nearly overwhelming him and allowing that cold chill to sink a bit deeper. Hollow indeed were his efforts, he thought, for no matter how many talons he killed, no matter whether he killed the wraith or the Black Warlock himself, it suddenly seemed to make no difference; the skull was an empty bone, lifeless, fleshless. The brain that had guided Meriwindle had been eaten by the worms. The warmth that had ever come forth from Meriwindle’s heart had been plucked by buzzards.
Bryan did not try to fight back the tears. For the first time since he had seen the smoke plume over Corning, the half-elf cried, truly cried, his sobs bending him low over the skeleton of his father. The chill of Mitchell’s mace retreated then, considerably, as if the powerful, real emotion gave back to the young half-elf a bit of his life force.
After many minutes, Bryan lifted his head and held the skull aloft before his wet eyes. “Farewell, my father,” he said quietly. “Your soul no sword could strike, no bird could peck, no worm could eat. Your soul could not be stolen by Thalasi, as your courage held firm against him.
“Courage,” he echoed softly, many times, that single word telling him who his father was, and who he must be. Eyes wide, he looked all around, up at the sky, down at the ground. “Be gentle, Death!” he cried at the top of his lungs. Then, in a lower, somber voice, “Never have you received so worthy a soul.”
And with that, Bryan laid the skull back down on the pile. He thought about burying the remains but dismissed the notion, realizing that this cairn of talon bones was more fitting a resting place for his gallant father. He let his hand slide over the smooth skull one more time, then he found his footing and started away. “Courage,” he said again.
Bryan, at last, had put his father to rest.
Now his thoughts turned to Rhiannon, and despair washed away, and all thoughts about the futility of his life and his efforts vanished. He could not help Meriwindle, but there were many alive because of his actions, and there were others, one in particular, that he simply would not allow to die.
One word became his litany as he forced one foot in front of the other, as he crossed through Corning’s eastern gate. One word, one denial, of all that seemed imminent.
“No.”
Chapter 10
By the Colonnae Trained
“OH, THERE IT is, I do daresay!” the wizard proclaimed, hopping up from his bedroll and jumping wildly, his huge sleeves flapping like the wings of a frightened bird. “I knew I would find it, yes I did, and not you, you silly ranger! Me before you, after all! Hah! Old man’s eyes aren’t so bad, then, eh?”
The ranger sprinted to the spot, dodging trees and skidding at last to the boulder tumble where he had left the sleeping Ardaz, the sheltered place that had served as their campsite the previous night.
“Hah!” Ardaz barked at him, snapping his fingers triumphantly in the air and standing tall indeed, his skinny arms crossed over his puffed-out chest. “An old man’s eyes see with the wisdom of ages, I say, I do daresay!”
Belexus looked around skeptically. They had set camp before sunset, and he had personally inspected all the area while Ardaz had unpacked the pegasus. The ranger could hardly believe that he had missed the telltale mountain face, the very focus of this difficult journey. Not quick to doubt the Silver Mage of Lochsilinilume, Belexus looked all around again, scanning slowly through each direction, and truly there loomed a multitude of towering peaks all about them; the shelter afforded by those walls of stone had been a primary consideration in picking this camping spot. So how had he possibly missed the most important view of the entire journey?
Or had he? he wondered after many moments of fruitless scanning. Finally, perplexed, the ranger turned to the wizard for clarification, for he could find nothing remarkable.
“Where?” he asked simply.
Ardaz looked around, his expression growing incredulous. “Well, I saw it. I did!” he protested. “And you know that I see what I said that I saw! Just after I awoke.”
“Dreaming the sight?” Belexus remarked, and despite his frustration that they were not, apparently, near the end of their journey, a smile found its way onto his face.
“After I awoke,” Ardaz repeated dryly. “Sitting here minding my own business, after all, and then, poof! there it was, an old man’s profile, not so far away. I am not crazy, you know,” he added in low tones.
Belexus glanced up to Desdemona, who was in cat form, lying in the sun across the top of one of the boulders. She regarded him and yawned profoundly, then stretched and rolled over, letting the warm sun—and it was indeed warm for the season—caress her ample belly.
“Oh, she’ll be a help,” Ardaz said with obvious sarcasm.
“Where, then?” the ranger asked again.
Ardaz hopped in circles, looking all around, eyes darting, arms flapping, scratching his chin repeate
dly and muttering “How curious, how very curious” many times. Finally he settled and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I did see it, after all.”
The ranger moved to inspect the wizard’s bedroll. “As soon as ye waked?” he reasoned.
“Well, and after a belch,” Ardaz replied. “But not too long a delay.”
To the wizard’s surprise, and confusion, Belexus then lay down atop Ardaz’ bedroll, then lifted his head just a bit. The ranger sat up quickly, smiling, then openly laughing, and the tone of his fit was more of resignation than of humor, as if to say, “I give up,” and not, “How amusing.”
“Are you to let me in on the joke?” Ardaz asked. “I mean, if I am the butt of it, after all, and since there is no one else for you to share it with.” As soon as he spoke the words, the wizard snapped a dangerous glare over the apparently oblivious—but Ardaz knew better—Desdemona. “And not a meow from you,” he said.
“Ye seen an old man’s profile,” the ranger explained. “Yer own.”
Ardaz snorted a dozen times, but lost his ire as Belexus pointed to a nearby wall of one of the boulders, its side covered by a cascade of ice.
The dumfounded wizard stuttered in protest, trying to refute the claim, but as he bumbled about, crouching to take the ranger’s perspective, he came to realize that Belexus had spoken truthfully. “Oh,” was all that Ardaz said.
Belexus laughed again, and now lost all of his frustration, allowing himself a bit of true mirth. The situation in all his world remained so very grim—the wraith, Andovar’s murderer, walked the world uncontested—but having the always-surprising Ardaz along on this long and perilous journey surely stole more than a bit of the tedium.
“I’ll play your fool, then,” the wizard said, seeming sullen. That mood lasted but a moment, though, Ardaz’ pout vanishing as the corners of his mouth inevitably turned upward. “My own profile,” he said suddenly. “Oh how jolly, how very jolly!”
It was a good laugh, a long laugh, followed by a hearty breakfast, after which Belexus announced that he would do a bit of hunting to try to restock their packs before they took to higher ground.
That left Ardaz alone to pack up the campsite. Desdemona watched the wizard work, the cat comfortably stretched on the warm boulder.
“So much help,” Ardaz complained to her.
She just rolled over again, warming the other side.
The cloud was huge, tremendous, beyond comprehension, a swirling mass of matter gradually, gradually contracting, pieces spinning off, the birth of stars.
And he watched it, saw it, the ages compressed into seconds, it seemed, or perhaps the seconds stretched out into ages. For out here, it didn’t matter. Out here, time was nonexistent, each instant its own bubble, always there, always recorded.
Immortality.
He knew that he would always be out here, that each moment of this experience would last forever and ever, and yet, he was going back, spinning through the galaxies, the star clusters. He saw the glowing rim, the sudden sunrise, and black turned to blue. So much blue! On and on he went, down and down, and he sensed the wind, though his less-than-corporeal form could not feel the wind. At least, not as he suspected he had once felt it.
There were colors below him, shining blue and dark brown, mostly blue, then mostly white and green, then still more white and green until it filled all his vision. White and green and brown and gray, a silver snake, a blue patch. Colors and texture, and familiarity somehow, though in the enormity of what he had seen, of what the angels had shown him, it seemed a distant memory indeed.
Down and down he dropped, and now he understood that he was indeed dropping, that there was a concept such as down. That recollection caused him to flinch, altogether unnecessarily, when he landed, when he did not continue to pass along, his form, somehow and somewhat more substantial than it had been, coming to rest on a hard gray surface.
“Ice,” he said, or rather, found himself saying, when he glanced to the side, to the crusted edges of a quick-running stream. The word, the sound, startled him, causing him to look down at himself. He had form again, real form, and not just the light he had been—the light he still was, though now he was encased in a somewhat corporeal coil. Even more curious, that coil was encased in a white material, a robe, he remembered.
“As it used to be,” he heard himself saying, and he screwed his unfamiliar face up curiously as he contemplated the notion of language, then grew even more curious as he considered the notion of time. “Used to be?” he asked, and the different inflection of words when used as a question only confounded him even more. “Always is, always was, always will be,” he recited, giving words to what he had learned to be the most pervasive and enduring truth about the universe, about existence itself. A jumble of thoughts came at him all at once, memories mixed with reasoning. He had worn this coil, this body, before, though it had been more substantial then, more attuned to the elements around it. He reached his hand down tentatively to brush the stone, to feel the stone. It seemed too smooth; he recognized that in his previous experience, the stone would have felt more grainy and rough, even painfully sharp-edged at some points.
For the spirit who had witnessed the birth and death of stars, it all seemed too curious. And so he sat, for a long, long while, and the entire concept of time, of the passage of moments, of a continuum, a fluid movement, came back to him. “Ice,” he said again, then, “Brook, stream, river … water. And snow, yes, of course. Snow.” He paused, then, mouthing that last word over and over, the very sound of it conjuring images of wild, playful fights, of rushing breakneck down hills, the wind blowing in his chilled ears. The very sound of it brought images of joy.
“Yes!” he said again suddenly. “Snow … and winter.” Again came that curious look, the strange-feeling face of this still-uncomfortable coil twisting and contorting. “Winter, cold,” he reasoned, and yet he did not feel cold. He looked down at his meager robes, and knew that they should not be able to ward any chill at all.
But as he thought about it, he did indeed come to feel cold—not unpleasantly so, not threateningly so, but rather a cold that he could control, that was there within his grasp only when he wanted to experience it. Already the spirit was beginning to understand that he was not quite the same—no, not at all—as he had once been. He was better now, he supposed, and he left it at that.
Something stirred to the side, moving out from under a tall pine tree.
“Deer,” the spirit said at once.
The creature froze in place, sniffed futilely at the air, ears twitching all the while. After some time, it seemed at last to see the form sitting on the stone, and away it leaped, disappearing from view in the wink of an eye.
“Curious,” the spirit remarked, and rose to follow. Again the binding form confused him, but he remembered enough to put one of his long lower limbs in front of the other and was soon walking steadily, a crude, but undeniably effective mode of transportation in this tangible, tiny-scale environment. Moving without a whisper of sound, he caught up to the deer in a small clearing not so far away. Once the creature noticed him, it again turned to flee, but this time the spirit reached out to it, imparted unthreatening thoughts to the creature, and it held still. He went to it, then, to examine it. Its fur seemed inviting; he vaguely remembered a pleasant sensation connected with touching it. Slowly, but eagerly, he lifted his arm, reached out his hand.
It passed right through the coat and the skin, slid right into the deer’s side.
The animal took flight, leaping wildly, running on and on at the edge of control.
“Oh pooh,” the spirit said, and he thought those words the most curious of all.
As if in answer, a bird chattered at him from above.
He answered with a telepathic thought, and the bird seemed less afraid, and would stay and converse with him. So he spent a long time standing there, below the tree branch, and he remembered even more of that past time, of this mortal coil. Soon he sensed hunger in the l
ittle creature, and then the bird flew off.
He lifted from the ground, too, thinking to follow, but he changed his mind, and instead went back to his stone by the stream. If the Colonnae had put him here for a purpose, then it was possible the reason would come to him, rather than he going off to try and find it. Because this place, though so infinitesimally tiny next to the star cloud, seemed large indeed when he was trapped within this corporeal coil.
He stood passively on the stone for a long time, then sat down—not because he was tired, but simply because he remembered that he used to sit down. Truly the new position was no more or less comfortable than standing, or than standing on his head for that matter, but he remembered that once it had been. The day brightened around him, then darkened once more, then brightened again and darkened, and again; and all the time he sat there, he recalled more and more of what had been, found more and more the perspectives imposed by this tangible world and these tangible trappings. He had been here once, in this frame of reference, this perspective. He knew that.
“Where, oh where, oh where, oh where?” the wizard mumbled, twiddling his thumbs. “Do go find him, Des. I do not want to waste my magical strength.”
The cat atop the boulder purred all the louder and made absolutely no move to leave.
“Beastly loyal,” Ardaz grumbled, a chant he felt was becoming all too common concerning Des, and he pulled himself to his feet. Indeed he did not want to delve into the realm of magic this morning; he was still exhausted from the magical flight that had brought him to Belexus, though that transformation had occurred more than a week before. “This is the old-fashioned way,” he said, and he started off, walking through the trees of the low valley.
Desdemona didn’t bother to follow.
Some time later, Ardaz sensed that he was being watched. At first he thought it to be Desdemona, but when he glanced all around, he came to know the truth. A white-tailed deer stood not so far away, motionless except for a slight trembling.