The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  She recovered herself with effort. When the blackness cleared from her vision, Caspar was at her elbow.

  “Why...” she had to work some moisture back into her mouth, her throat was so hoarse, her core so hollow. She turned him a desperate look. “Why did you leave me?”

  “Leave you?” He studied her face with concern. “I haven’t left your side even for an instant.”

  The floor seemed to drop out from under her.

  Nadia spun a desperate look around. “Where did he go? The man?”

  “What man?”

  “The tall man with the blue eyes!” She looked back to him urgently. “You were there. You saw him!”

  Caspar was looking truly afraid for her now. “I saw no one, Princess. You froze, looking like you’d seen a ghost.”

  Feeling frantic, Nadia pressed palms to her eyes. Who was he? Who was he? Who was he? her thoughts shouted.

  Suddenly everyone in the room began speaking at once as the whirlwind of his name tumbled from tongue to tongue, ripping away all other conversation.

  “...the Demon Lord...”

  “..the Lord of Shadows...”

  “Ba’alen...”

  “Belloth...”

  “...the Beguiler...”

  His many epithets danced through the crowd like a flurry of leaves on the autumn wind.

  Nadia had her answer.

  She fainted dead away.

  Twenty-nine

  “There is a fellowship more silent than solitude,

  more intimate than consuming a star.

  This is what you have broken with me.”

  –Darshanvenkhátraman, Destroyer of Hope,

  to his brother Pelas

  Pelas flew into the dawn, having left Tanis back at his uncle’s command center to meet up with the Eltanese. The sun was glazing the east in brilliant rose, while directly ahead of him in the south, Rinokh’s storm throbbed, forbidding and unnatural.

  Pelas knew its deconstruction on multiple planes.

  His human eyes, veiled with the weakness of corporeality, had only seen the darkly churning storm, but his immortal gaze revealed fraying magnetic ley lines dumping ionic shavings into the sky, and a firmament boiling—buckling—beneath Rinokh’s malevolent unmaking.

  Pelas was no match for Rinokh in the form, but he felt an urgency to do something. He couldn’t watch impotently while everyone’s hopes died, subject to his eldest brother’s uninspected need to destroy.

  Uninspected. He’d read of the word in this context in the Vestal’s library in Adonnai. A wielder becomes slave to his every uninspected decision or action.

  This was the essence of the problem they faced in their eternity: a purpose given, invested—implanted in the fibers of their immortal construction—and acted upon without conscious decision or choice.

  Before coming to the Realms of Light, they’d never thought to question their purpose, their own determinism over it, or even whether it was a purpose worth pursuing. They had never inspected it. And any decision, gone uninspected, has the potential to trap one into an unawareness of intent.

  KNOW the effect you intend to create. It was a wielder’s First Law, but Pelas thought it applied to every aspect of existence.

  Suddenly, he knew exactly how to best help Tanis and the others.

  He accelerated towards the aurora that was the world’s tear.

  The magnetic deconstruction of T’khendar’s fabric was resulting in an interplay of light against charged particles which extended the full width of the sky, easily two hundred miles, yet the tear itself might’ve been a quarter of that.

  The closer he came to the tear, the greater the magnetic resistance. He perceived as well the irradiated plasma of solar wind seeping through the planet’s eroding magnetosphere. His immortal construction simply absorbed these phenomena and dispersed or deconstructed them into harmless, inert matter in his wake.

  Beyond the tear, Rinokh hovered, a giant mass of dark matter, his own event horizon—and beyond him, Chaos.

  Pelas couldn’t see his brother through the aurora, but he could perceive his hulking form beyond the planet’s magnetic tides, and for the first time since Rinokh’s shell had been unmade, he could also perceive his mind.

  Brother.

  Pelasommáyurek. His eldest brother’s mental voice always carried the tang of reproach. Long has it been since I felt any of your thoughts. Where be you?

  Inside the degenerating world.

  Splendid. Begin your unmaking from that side and we’ll meet in the gas of its remains.

  Rinokh...have you ever considered that perhaps this world should remain?

  What nonsense is this?

  Darshan and I have been considering it.

  That is the problem with both of you—too much time thinking instead of doing. Cease your itinerant dallying and return to the task at hand.

  Well...it had been worth a try.

  Carefully guarding his thoughts, Pelas replied, There is some kind of interference here, brother. A strange ridge in the magnetic tide. I think it’s keeping the world from tearing open. Perhaps...if you came closer, we could focus together upon this point and make faster work of it.

  Rinokh harrumphed his irritation.

  Pelas needed him closer, and he needed him off the actual energy ridge he’d been focusing his attention upon.

  He felt his brother’s approach as a pressure flattening the magnetic tide, creating his own inverse bubble in the planet’s magnetosphere. In concert with this, Pelas saw a spot of darkness growing larger beyond the magnetic aurora. This is what he needed most—a direct line of sight upon his brother’s form.

  Pelas hovered, bracing himself for the physics that would come into play upon carrying out his intent.

  The great swath of dark energy that was Rinokh grew larger beyond the shimmering veil. I see no ridge here, Pelasommáyur—

  Pelas threw his net.

  Boundlessly pliable, capable of containing the riotous energy of a star, the field snapped closed around Rinokh with a flash.

  He hadn’t been certain it would reach his brother through the planet’s magnetic field, but he saw it contract to Rinokh’s darkness in the same moment that his brother growled, Pelas, what is this you do?

  Pelas hovered beyond the aurora wearing an immortal smile. Honestly, brother. You should know I cannot unmake the world from within, even were I so inclined, which I’m not.

  You always were a vexsome youth!

  Rinokh struggled against the plasma field Pelas had secured around him. Beyond the shimmering tides of the planet, a small star contracted and bloomed, bloomed and contracted, but the doughy platelet had his brother well contained.

  He would be able to unmake it, of course, once he figured out that he couldn’t sear through it, which, knowing his brother’s obstinate nature, might take a week or two. In the very least, he’d bought them all some time.

  And in the best case...

  Pelas had no idea how to do what he wanted to do, but he knew very clearly what he wanted to do. KNOW the effect you intend to create.

  Pelas got to work mending the tear.

  Much later, he hung poised in T’khendar’s outer atmosphere, in that place of paucity where space merged with the planet’s gasses. He hovered just inside the thin magnetic membrane, feeling ice crystallizing on his wings and chill vapor in his lungs, and listening to the cacophony of starsong mingled with the churning roar of Rinokh’s storm miles below him.

  He couldn’t help wondering when he’d truly crossed the point of no return. Was it in defying Rinokh to repair T’khendar’s tear? Was it in binding with Tanis, in defiance of all his brothers? Was it in choosing to pursue the creation of beauty and experience in that realm, almost from the moment he’d entered it? Or was it in entering the realm at all and abandoning his role in Chaos by so doing?

  He also couldn’t help wondering: in any or all of this, was he defying their Maker or merely continuing upon his own inevitable path
of self-discovery? Could a being—mortal or otherwise—remain eternally blind to the existence of his own self-determined purpose?

  He wondered what Darshan would say with his newfound views on humanity’s purpose. He wondered more what his brother might be able to do to help.

  He reached for Darshan’s thoughts. I need to see you.

  While he waited for his brother’s reply, Pelas dove down towards the storm, spiraling through a silver webwork of magnetic fractures toward the gelatinous glow stained by the ionic char of a bleeding world.

  He’d painted a sky like that once, long ago, when Darshan had driven him into a fury. He’d layered within that pigmented firmament all of his rage over the mastication of his brotherly allegiance into a pulp of betrayal, telling the story of their fractured fellowship in churned clouds and raining ash.

  That might’ve been the last time he’d thought of Darshan with endearment, even as corroded as his affections had become by then. Still, while painting Darshan’s broken troth into the variegated clouds, a part of him had mourned their lost communion.

  Where? came Darshan’s reply, alacritous and unconditional.

  For a moment, Pelas couldn’t respond, he was so choked at Darshan’s willing reception to his call after so many decades of vehement estrangement.

  Pelas closed his eyes against the wind. Anywhere you choose.

  He perceived Darshan weaving him into the construct of his mind then, as he’d always done for them in the Void. Since the beginning of time, it seemed, Darshan had sketched the canvas for their conversations, crafting his own version of the Adept Dreamscape.

  It had been centuries since Darshan had welcomed Pelas into his thoughts; centuries since Pelas would have been willing to be there. Long years of intimacy lost between them. Pelas had resigned himself to this loss.

  Resigned himself? By Chaos born! He’d sworn he would never reach to his brother in amity ever again!

  Yet here they were now. Not because he’d been broken or bound, degraded or subjugated to Darshan’s will, but in parity, with camaraderie, under the most improbable circumstances imaginable.

  Darshan spread his canvas and drew Pelas within it, whereupon the latter found himself standing beneath the dome of a gazebo, gazing between limestone columns at distant, rolling hills and vineyards painted in the bold wash of autumn’s kiss.

  Beyond these but still close enough to imagine their chill, snowy mountains sketched in charcoal and white peered among the thunderheads of a storm.

  Pelas turned and saw his brother leaning against a column, clad in loose linen and gazing off over the painted hills. Pelas regarded the scene bemusedly. “Is this the Solvayre?”

  “Yes. Kjieran likes it here.” Darshan turned his head and looked Pelas over, whereupon a faint smile touched his lips, reminiscent of ages past. “It’s been quite some time since you trod the canvas of my mind.”

  “I was just thinking that.” Pelas pushed hands in his pockets and joined his brother in gazing out across the sloping hillside.

  In the distance, a terra-cotta roofed villa sat amid burnished vineyards at the end of a drive framed by the slender spires of cypress trees. Such villas were more plentiful than mushrooms, there in Agasan’s famous wine-growing region, yet this one seemed special somehow, unique. His brother had painted it in sunlight.

  “This is...different.” Pelas aimed a curious look at Darshan. “Is the landscape part of the new you? I was expecting something stormier.”

  “Chaos makes Kjieran uncomfortable.”

  “Kjieran again.” Pelas tilted his head at him. “I saw the truthreader in your thoughts moons ago...what am I missing here?”

  Darshan nodded towards a figure who was just then approaching over a rise, whereupon his expression changed completely—astonishingly.

  Pelas swung a stare at the man. “Who is that?”

  Darshan exhaled a slow sigh. “That is Kjieran.”

  Pelas worked fast to make sense of everything he was perceiving of his brother’s thoughts. “I thought Kjieran van Stone immolated himself.”

  “That is unfortunately true.”

  Pelas studied the approaching Adept. He had a lean, fey look to him, with dark hair just brushing his shoulders and straight brows shading colorless eyes. Pelas could easily see why his brother was attracted to him.

  But if Kjieran van Stone was dead...why was his doppelganger traipsing freely around the canvas of Darshan’s mind?

  Kjieran stopped before the two of them and smiled. He handed Darshan an apple. “Here, I just picked this.”

  “Thank you.” Darshan studied the apple while Pelas studied Kjieran. “Kjieran, this is my brother Pelas.”

  “Of course he is.” Kjieran offered his hand and a wide smile. He was quite a good-looking man of perhaps twenty and five...or at least, that’s how his brother was painting him, there in the canvas of his thoughts.

  Pelas freely admitted he was grappling to understand. He clasped wrists with the truthreader, staring at him, perceiving him, trying to see around some illusion or craft.

  He scanned every inch of the being standing before him, then speared a stare at his brother. “Is he real?”

  “You tell me, Pelas. Neither Kjieran nor I have been able to decide.” Darshan studied the apple in his hand with a furrow between his brows. “I am either mad...or I have bound Kjieran’s immortal soul to mine against his consent. I’m not sure which truth I now find more unpalatable.”

  As Pelas processed this startling truth, some things became clear, while others grew more obscure. “Forgive me if this sounds callous, but you’re truly not crafting him?”

  Darshan lifted his gaze off over the hills. “I created this construct to give Kjieran a place to exist. Better that than having him haunting my dreams...or me haunting his.”

  “I’m not sure that I dream, actually.” Kjieran was studying Pelas as interestedly as Pelas was studying him. “I only knew myself as myself when your brother summoned me to his dreams. That is...” his eyes shifted to Darshan, demure, solicitous. “That is, until he brought me here.”

  Pelas had to keep reminding himself that stranger things had happened, even if he was having difficulty thinking of any examples in that moment. He asked Kjieran as gently as he could, “You didn’t go into the Returning?”

  “It appears not.” Darshan pocketed his apple. “Kjieran, would you give me a few minutes with my brother?”

  “Of course, my lord.” Kjieran offered Pelas a smile of parting and started off.

  But Darshan caught his arm. When Kjieran looked inquiringly back to him, Pelas saw in his earnest expression all of the innocent beauty that made truthreaders so unique among the Adept race, the same innocence that had immediately endeared Tanis to him.

  Darshan cupped Kjieran’s face and slowly ran his thumb along his lower lip. His eyes were sensuously dark. “I am not sending you away.”

  Kjieran smiled, and in this far from innocent smile, he revealed more to Pelas about their relationship than any words could’ve conveyed. “Nor am I leaving, my lord.” He glanced unabashedly to Pelas then, even though after the potency of that exchange, Pelas had expected him to be blushing, and took his leave.

  Pelas joined his brother in frowning as they watched Kjieran walking down the path. “I knew his loss had changed you,” he said quietly. “I know I even said as much to torment you, but I never truly imagined...” Pelas laid a hand on Darshan’s shoulder. “You’re in love with him?”

  Darshan turned a darkly meditative gaze to meet his. “For Kjieran, I have spared this world.”

  Pelas sank back against the opposite column, wordless. Yet somehow, he wasn’t surprised, for it made sense of his brother’s miraculous change of heart. “You must have reason to believe he’ll be able to Return.”

  Darshan watched Kjieran until he vanished below the lip of the hill. “Socotra called us vortices.” He shifted his gaze to Pelas by way of invitation and started off along the path around the gazebo.r />
  “Socotra?” Pelas pushed off the column after him. “My Socotra?”

  “By all accounts, a fascinating woman.” Darshan gave him the ghost of a smile. “I understand now the attraction you had for her.”

  Kjieran, Socotra...Pelas was beginning to feel as if his brother was dragging him behind his chariot, where each new unfolding fact bounced and careened him haphazardly without giving him time to recover from the last one. “Whatever possessed you to visit Socotra Isio?”

  Darshan eyed him broodingly. “In one of my dreams, you said I needed to get out into the world.”

  “Ah, this again.” Pelas chuckled and shook his head. Understanding colored his amusement now. “I wasn’t intruding on your dreams. You have my word. Though I wish that I had been. To take credit for this miraculous change in you would be quite the feather in my cap.”

  Darshan grunted.

  “So you went to the Sormitáge and sought out their foremost Sobra scholar...what did you learn from her?”

  Darshan was strolling with his hands in his pockets, posing a relaxed figure against the backdrop of green hills, dark mountains and blue sky. But Pelas was sharing his mind. He knew this idyll was merely a veneer glossing over his brother’s deep-seated unrest.

  “It appears that I am holding Kjieran on this plane.” Darshan met his gaze for a moment, conveying in their meeting of eyes the panoply of discordant truths he now recognized. “We are bound. I watched him die—watched him betraying me in the doing, and in every moment of it I was powerless to stop him. Even so, I was unwilling to let him go. I never imagined I could actually prevent his soul’s departure when I’d been so impotent in preventing his suicide.”

  He stopped at a fork in the path and frowned towards an adjoining valley. “Socotra didn’t know of any way to release Kjieran back into the Returning. She advised me to speak to the Prophetess.”

  “Isabel?” Pelas blew out his disbelief. “It’s provident I didn’t kill her then, isn’t it?” He stared, wide-eyed, at his brother.

  Darshan arched brows. “Many things I might once have cursed have proven provident, in view of new perspectives.” He started down the path to the right.