I went.
I didn’t have—
“—A CHANCE against it,” Morgan said. “The King was weak, and Myrin had begun whispering poison in his ear, although we hadn’t known it. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. Because if I allow myself to ruminate upon it, if I allow myself to give it any more thought than I already have, I’ll look back and see that I, like Randall, turned a blind eye to what was happening. I would see that I refused to believe in what was happening right in front of me. That the Myrin we’d known, the Myrin we’d loved, had become lost to us. He had chosen to turn in a direction that we could not follow, no matter how much we wanted to be with him.”
He looked up at me. “Do you know what that’s like, Sam? To feel the sting and burn of such duplicity? I know you think you might, that you think that I, and Randall, have betrayed your trust in us. I understand that. I don’t repudiate your right to feel that way. I don’t. But I ask that you see it from our perspective. To feel what we did. You may not understand why we did what we did, but the choices we made came from a place born of betrayal.”
I said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t make me sound petty.
“The King went mad,” Morgan said flatly. “His mind was taken from him because of Myrin. He was nothing but a shadow puppet, a falsity that danced in the firelight. Through Myrin, the King gave orders that led to war. Wizards began to rise from the Dark Woods in numbers that we did not expect, and they looked to Myrin as their leader. Many people died without understanding what they were dying for. Randall and I… we did everything we could think of. But I was an apprentice who didn’t yet have a cornerstone, and Randall was a wizard in the process of losing his. Sam, it—nothing can prepare you for that. Nothing can prepare you for how it’s going to feel when your other half, the person on which you’ve built your life, your magic, is tearing themselves away from you while they break themselves apart. Losing a cornerstone to death is always a difficult time for a wizard. But losing your cornerstone to the Dark, it… changes you, Sam. It makes you angry and bitter, it feels like burning oil is in your veins. At least, that’s what Randall told me many decades later.”
“How did you stop him?” I asked hoarsely. “How did you end it?”
He closed his eyes and said—
SAM.
Come to me.
Come and see what they have made.
I opened my eyes.
I stood at the edge of the dock. The water lapped underneath me. The dock itself swayed gently. Every part of me was electrified.
I looked down into the lake. The water was clear and smooth and echoed the night sky above. It looked as if I was trapped between two mirrors, and I didn’t know which cast the true reflection. I was barefoot. I didn’t know why that stuck out to me.
A ripple came toward me, spreading wider and wider as it rolled through the water. There came another. And another. And another. The stars were shaking.
I looked up.
A man walked toward me. Each step was deliberate, measuredly paced. He wore a pair of tight-fitting trousers and a jerkin with rows of buttons down the front. It curved up into a collar around his neck.
And he was walking on water.
It shouldn’t have been possible.
This had to be a dream.
He was familiar. I could see it in his face. He had the same eyes as the man who’d found me in the alley after I’d turned a group of teenage douchebags to stone. The same beard that curled down the front of him, long and luxuriant. It was such a discordant image that I expected to see pink shoes that curled at the tips on his feet. There weren’t. He was barefoot. Each step he took, his feet barely sank below the surface of the water. He even almost looked to be the same age as my mentor, though I knew him to be far older.
I knew this man, though I’d never seen his face before in my life.
He stopped some distance away, a smile playing on his lips. Now that he was closer, I could see the similarities between him and his brother were an illusion. Yes, he had the eyes and the beard, yes, they were from the same blood, but that’s where it ended. Morgan’s eyes were kind and strong. He held himself high because it was what was expected of him. The power that emanated from him was there because of the sum of the parts that made up his life, both the good and the bad. Morgan was my friend. He was my mentor. I trusted him with my life.
This man couldn’t be further from Morgan had he tried. Morgan’s magic had always meshed well with mine. It came from our years together. This man’s magic tried to do the same, but it felt slick and oily and wrong, and I could only think of how my magic had felt around Ruv, how there was a recognition there since he could have been a cornerstone. But it hadn’t been right, because I already had Ryan.
This wasn’t right, because I already had Morgan.
There were shadows curling around him like liquid smoke. I wondered if that was his magic. I saw the green and the gold. The colors of the world I’d been brought into.
It looked as if all he saw was black.
“Sam of Wilds,” he said, his voice softer than I’d been expecting. It had a lilt to it, almost musically so. It was… calm. Soothing. And oh so wrong. “How lovely it is to look upon your face free from the confines of a dream. I shall remember this moment for an eternity.”
“Myrin,” I breathed.
ONCE UPON a time, there was a wizard who was loved deeply by two different men.
One was the love of a brother.
The other was the love fated by the stars.
It was a bright and fierce thing, their love. Capable of such wondrous things.
But in the end, it mattered not.
The wizard lost himself on a path that those who loved him could never understand. He descended into the Dark, consumed by the temptation of a magic that should not have existed. But boundaries had been broken; barriers had been shattered. There was poison in his words, poison that was dripped into the ears of the weak of heart. Follow me, he whispered. Follow me and I will show you the way.
And the weak of heart had followed.
The brother begged him when they met in a clearing in the Dark Woods. The brother pleaded with him. Think of Randall! Think of our parents! Think of me! Gods, please, Myrin, I beg you. Think of me.
But the wizard known as Myrin did not.
The love fated by the stars was a great wizard in his own right, and did not beg. He did not plead. Instead, Randall gave an ultimatum, though it broke his heart: Turn away. Turn away and renounce your magic. End this nonsense, Myrin, and I will see to it that you are brought home.
And for a moment, it looked as if Myrin would consider it. There was a flash in his eyes, a crack of the mask. The brother saw the man that had once been before all of this. He saw his brother before him, and he thought it’d be enough. That this would end here as the Dark Woods burned around them and they wouldn’t have to go through with what they had planned.
Stone crumbled. It always did.
But Myrin did not.
I cannot do that, he said. I am too far gone to ever return.
Then so be it, Randall said. Morgan.
And Morgan said, I can’t.
The air stilled around them.
Myrin cocked his head. Second thoughts, little brother?
But Morgan only had eyes for Randall. Please. There has to be another way.
There isn’t, Randall said. You knew it would come to this.
But—
Morgan. As my pupil, I am commanding you.
Morgan hung his head.
Myrin laughed. What’s all this, then? You think you can defeat me? Oh, Randall. Love. You have no idea what I’m capable of.
And Randall looked into the eyes of his cornerstone and said, I know. I know what you’re capable of. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that you underestimated what I am capable of.
There was a crack in the sky.
A crack in the air.
A crack in the ear
th.
Randall’s hands were raised before him, palms toward Myrin.
And with a song of sorrow in his heart, Morgan did the same.
At first, Myrin laughed.
He said, This is nothing. You both are nothing. You won’t kill me. You don’t have it in you.
And in that, he was right: they did not have it in their hearts to kill him. They couldn’t find it in themselves to destroy the one thing they both loved most in the world. Call it a weakness. Call it their undoing, but they could not kill Myrin.
Myrin, for all that he’d become, underestimated the one thing he should not have: Randall’s and Morgan’s love for the man he once had been.
It was this love that tore a hole between the worlds. That opened the gateway to a realm steeped in shadows. Magic such as this hadn’t been seen in the real world before. And it took a piece of their soul to do it. But as the gateway widened, as the shadows whipped out and curled themselves around Myrin’s legs, knocking him to the ground, they knew in their soul-struck hearts that they had made their choice, just as Myrin had made his.
He screamed at them to save him. He told them he could change. Don’t do this, he begged them. And when he saw they were not coming to his aid, he stopped his pleadings and snarled at them both. I will return. I will have my revenge. And this time, you won’t see me coming. I will take everything precious from you. Everything you hold dear will be torn away. This I promise you.
And then shadows enveloped his body and pulled him from this world to the next.
The gateway closed with a furious crash.
The clearing in the Dark Woods fell quiet, the only sound being the great heaving sobs of the younger brother.
Eventually, they left.
Eventually, Randall pulled the King of Sorrows from madness by the sheer force of his will alone.
Eventually, the name Myrin was wiped from the memory of Verania.
As if he had never been at all.
“YES,” MYRIN said, sounding amused. “Quite the sad story, I know. It’s just so… melodramatic, isn’t it? If it hadn’t actually happened to me, it would be one of those things that’s hard to believe. Alas, I don’t have problems with belief. Do you, Sam? Do you have problems believing?”
“You’re standing on water after having broken your way out of the shadow realm,” I said. “I’m really not having a problem believing right now.”
He tossed his head back and laughed. It sounded so much like Morgan, and the dissonance caused blood to rush in my ears. “Oh, Sam,” he said, chuckling. “I know now what he sees in you. Honestly, it took me a while. I mean, hearing from a god that a child would rise against me? Can you imagine what that must have felt like?”
“Um. No? Wait. Yes. Because a god told me that another villain would come here and blah, blah, blah and then I would have to kick his ass and then all would be right with the world. So I guess I could imagine that after all.”
He cocked his head at me. “That easy, is it?”
“Yes.”
“Really. Well. I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Would you like me to tell you why?”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh gods. This is it, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“This is where you monologue. For fuck’s sake. We already had that moment. I thought we were past this. What the fuck, man? Don’t you remember? You were all like, hey, you, I’m your opposite, and, oh, look at me, gods and partiality and death and destruction and what the fuck ever. I am so sick of villains like you. What the fuck is your deal?”
He looked taken aback, but he covered it up quickly. “Sam,” he said. “Believe me when I say you have never faced someone like me. It will be an education like you’ve never before experienced. But first, a chance for you. To end this all now.”
“Let me guess,” I said, trying to sift through the green and the gold. My magic was running through me, thrumming just underneath my skin. They had to feel it. Ryan. Gary. Tiggy. Kevin. Maybe even Zero. They had to. And if they did, we could end this now. We could. “You’re gonna give me the chance to join you—again, by the way—to be by your side, to learn how to be a Dark douchebag. Sound about right?”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “That sounds about right.”
“Because—oh, whaddya know—there’s never been someone like you, but oh look, there’s never been someone like me either. Sound about right?”
“Quite.”
“And if I don’t join you, you’re going to kill everyone and everything I love. And if I do join you, you’ll spare the others and you and me will live happily ever after in some cave in the Dark Woods while you continue my wizard training to make me into a fucking dickbag who monologues with the best of them.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s a cave. I mean, there’s a house and everything. And you’re sort of monologuing right now. I don’t know how much more training in that you would need.”
“Okay, let me stop you right there. No.”
“No?”
“No. I will not. I won’t ever. You can just cut that shit out of your diabolical scheme right now.”
“My diabolical scheme,” he repeated.
I squinted at him. “You do have a diabolical scheme, don’t you? I mean, you’re a villain, right? The big bad? It’s kind of in the job description, dude.”
“Oh,” he said. “Is it now?”
“Wow, you sort of suck at the whole villain thing. Am I going to have to tell you how to do this too? Yikes. I think the star dragon might have seriously overestimated your abilities. That’s… slightly depressing. Oh! Don’t get me wrong. I’m super glad that you’re… like that. I just thought there would be more of a challenge.” And why the hell could I not feel any of the others? Why couldn’t I at least get through to Kevin?
“I think there may have been a bit of a misunderstanding,” he said.
I snorted. “You’re telling me. Are you going to need a moment to shift your worldview back to being a bottom feeder?”
“You talk too much.”
“Eh. I’ve been told that before. Still my thing. Dude, just listen, okay? Can you do that? Okay. So. You won’t get the dragons. I already have two of them. I know the star dragon had to come to you and whatever—which, let’s be honest, as far as prophecies go, that’s really sort of lame—but you won’t get what I have. Kevin is mine. Zero is mine. The other three will be mine. You won’t have them.”
“You’re a bit of the cocky sort, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. “Prophecies from the gods will do that to you.”
“You forget,” he said, taking another step forward, and this time I felt it. The water didn’t ripple, it fucking cracked under his feet, like it was something solid. It reverberated through me, like it was a physical thing, rattling my bones and causing my skin to vibrate. “The prophecy wasn’t just about you.”
I took a step back. I didn’t mean to. It showed weakness. It would lend credence to the idea that I was afraid. I couldn’t show him that.
Even if it was true.
Because I was alone and facing Myrin, the dark man in shadows.
“The dragons—”
“Here’s a hint, Sam,” Myrin said, smile dropping from his face. “It’s never been about the dragons. I don’t want the dragons. Those are all yours, kiddo. Gather them. Don’t. I don’t give a fuck what you do with them. In the end, it won’t matter. For them. For you.”
“What? Then what hell is your plan?”
“I thought you said you hated it when villains monologue?”
“Wow, way to throw my words right back in my face—”
He took another step, and it was like I was getting assaulted by his magic. It wasn’t the morganhomesafe melding that happened with my mentor. This felt like it was forcing itself on me, like it was trying to take me over. The hook in my head pulled sharply, causing me to groan as I was enveloped by him. By everything about him. I’d never had this before
. Never felt strength like this before. Not even when Randall had given me his all that day in the field when he’d brought the lightning down upon me.
This was more.
“You have no idea what it’s been like,” he said, eyes blazing. “What I’ve learned in the shadow realm. It was hell, it was pain and torture, but it was an experience, Sam. It changed me in ways I never expected. It made me more than I ever thought I could be. And when the star dragon came to me? When he told me my destiny? That was the day I knew, the day I transformed. The seal was cracked, and I began to slip through. They didn’t even notice. Randall and Morgan didn’t notice. It took a long time, but I did it, Sam. I slipped through.”
“Monologuing,” I said through gritted teeth. “You’re… still… monologuing.”
“They can’t feel you,” he said. “If that’s what you’re wondering. The others. Your little cabal. Your cornerstone. None of them can feel you. I’ve cut you off from them so that we could have this little… chat.”
“Gods, shut up,” I snarled at him as I was forced to my knees. The weight of his everything bore down upon me, and it was rust and shadow, harsh and biting. I pushed through it, searching for the gold and the green. Searching for my way back home.
The smile on his face was a nasty thing. “Don’t you want to know why? Don’t you want to know what this is all about?”
“Fuck… you.”
“Sam. Sam, Sam, Sam. Don’t you see? No. I am your father.”
“What?”
The smile widened. “Just kidding. I’ve always wanted to say that.”
I’d had enough. Of him. Of this. Of a history that I didn’t want but that I was mired in. He was no different than the others that had come before him. And I had bested them.
I would do the same to him.
I pulled my hands back at my sides, then thrust them forward, crying out at the pain it caused to burst through the layers of shadows wrapped around me. Lake water snapped frozen in a split second as it rose into a wave of razor-sharp spikes of ice. They hurtled toward him, and I felt no regret at the thought of him being pierced from head to toe. Death would mean an end to all of this. I could go home.