The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Would you have made this choice if you’d known what was coming?

  The truth was, she didn’t know. When it came to her future, all she seemed possessed of these days was numb indecision. It was the thing that most frightened her about herself, and it infuriated her brother no end.

  Far below her, the sa’reyth lay quiet now, sleeping. In the adjoining valley, the Nodefinders had turned down the lamps and found their cots. Vaile’s long-hearing ears brought her the somnolent discord of Fynnlar’s soft snoring.

  The wind was making constant gooseflesh of her skin that night. Inhaling felt like breathing needles into her lungs. But the cold in her core was colder still. Far colder than the ice clinging to her lashes. She saved the fifth now for things more important than freezing to death.

  She could’ve mended herself, once...but that road lay behind her, lost on a switchback trail of choices she would rather have forgotten yet seemed doomed to recollect with perfect clarity.

  The choice to go to Darroyhan. To step on the field. To defy Balance and save Trell. She regretted none of these choices. The drachwyr hadn’t even wondered at them. They knew Cephrael had been no friend to her for a very long while.

  But the choice to do nothing to save herself...she had to make that choice newly every single day.

  The bolt of deyjiin that the demon had blasted into her on Darroyhan had only momentarily overwhelmed her system. Some simple steps of her own and a Healing from the First Lord would’ve mended her right as rain.

  But she’d allowed the imbalance to fester, to become the canker death eating her from inside. Now deyjiin’s singularity burned within her, drawing her life energy into its insatiable core.

  Oddly, she’d thought she would see her future better once it had become so assured, but the waters ahead were more muddied than ever, while those behind remained too clear. Ironies abounded.

  In the distance, ice cracked. Snow heaved a sigh and shifted its bulk, and an errant tumble frothed down the glacier. Above her, Mother Earth swung her child moon in a twirling arc as they flew through the heavens, locked in a perpetually spinning embrace.

  Vaile gazed through crystalized lashes at a panorama of diamond-sharp stars. The night was so clear, and the sleeping land beneath her so dark, she could see all the way to the next realm—clear to the edges of creation if she chose.

  A zanthyr’s eyes saw every refraction of light in the visible spectrum. Were she to phase-shift partway into the form—as she’d done that night, so that her pupils assumed a cat’s oval aperture—her vision became spectroscopic, enabling her to discern any wavelength and frequency in the full range from infrared to ultraviolet. She needed only to lay her gaze upon a star to assess its astronomical distance.

  So it should’ve been absolutely impossible for her not to find her brothers anywhere in the night sky.

  Oh, their stars were there. Czavo’s always rose behind the sa’reyth’s erratic moon. Sabrian’s was the first to appear during the hour of dusk. But her brothers themselves...they weren’t resting among the stars as they should’ve been, recovering their strength, regenerating, readying themselves to return to the realms when interest or Balance summoned. Even were they to lie among the vastness of space, dormant as a dark star, she should’ve been able to read the wavelength of their life signatures within the infrared spectrum.

  Yet Sabrian and Czavo weren’t there.

  Vaile turned her gaze from a truth she didn’t want to think about and focused in a new direction. The sight was no more heartening.

  Deep in the southern sky, positioned directly between two jagged peaks, the black silhouette of T’khendar shone to her enhanced vision. Crimson limned half the world.

  Centuries ago, she’d sat in that very spot, watching night after night as the First Lord and his Council of Nine had constructed T’khendar to plug the tear in Alorin’s aether—a contusion which at that time had glowed like phosphor in the ultraviolet spectrum.

  Thinking of the tear twisted her thoughts into dark shapes.

  Vaile’s body shivered.

  A sharp rock lodged beneath her boot was jutting into the soft flesh of her foot. She smoothed the stone by melting it with a thought, then felt a twinge of sickness that brought a pressure to the back of her throat. Faint. Easy to ignore.

  Not so easy was the overwhelming sense of loss that dragged at her every breath.

  Immortality could be...challenging.

  If any aspect of the human plight elicited her envy, it was the gift of amnesia of one’s previous lives.

  To be free of the regrets of centuries. To know only one lifetime’s worth of heartache. To no longer bear the desolate sense of loss that only compounded through the unending millennia. To have forgotten the tragedy of mankind’s repeating cycles of destruction...

  What would she have given to live one lifetime still invested with hope for what her life might bring? To naively believe that goodness thrived in the hearts of all men? To have awoken each dawn with a smile at the day’s possibility?

  What would she have given to be able to forget the ones to whom she’d offered her heart and too quickly thereafter lost, before she could reclaim that important piece of herself? What would she have traded to know not an empty ache that never abated, but with each new lifetime, the blossoming warmth of affection, the fever of passion, the kiln heat of enduring love.

  You have known these sensations.

  Yes, but it had been millennia since she’d felt them.

  Her mistakes...well, she could live with those. They were hers. She owned them.

  But the horrific crimes man and immortal perpetrated against their own kind; the treachery, the tyranny, the sanctimonious hate...the sheer maliciousness towards all that was precious in life...to suffer innumerable consequential losses by others’ hands...

  Too many of the ones she’d loved had been stolen from her before their time, never to be found again on the mortal fabric. Over the millennia, her treasured brothers and sisters had abandoned her in favor of the oblivion offered by the stars. And what should have been an immortal love had become an immortal ache.

  Unremitting, unending, unrelenting passed the years.

  Atop her lonely mountain, Vaile shivered.

  At least the cold made her feel something.

  Vaile....

  Her brother’s calling cast a hot spear through her thoughts. Perhaps he’d perceived her troubled mindset and was reaching out to console her with his usual patience and compassion.

  Right. And warthogs farted dragon eggs.

  Hello, Phaedor.

  His mind lay open to her, but he gave no response, only maintained their connection, sharing the stillness of his thoughts, ostensibly giving her a chance to say something...perhaps to confess her despair so that he could chastise her for it, as was his wont.

  Well, two could play at that game. Vaile focused her gaze off into the night.

  Only...her brother’s open mind made a vortex for her attention, such that she couldn’t ignore him when he was obviously not ignoring her. Worse, the calmness of his mind formed a vacuum for her emotion, drawing it to the forefront of her own thoughts, choking off speech.

  Between them, the silence lengthened. The wind howled. Vaile’s hair flew in tangles, like her heart.

  Eventually the silence grew so long, with the warmth of Phaedor’s mental presence flowing quietly into her the while, that she began to wonder if he actually was just offering a warm hand to hold.

  Which irritated her no end. His compassion was the last thing she needed. Compassion from him would only make her cry—and damn him for knowing that and offering it anyway!

  Vaile’s emerald gaze grew steely. You are the most infuriating creature our Maker ever saw fit to bring into this or any world in the known!

  Phaedor chuckled. My love to you, too, sister.

  His voice felt molten in her thoughts. Elae’s warmth flowed into her core, where the singularity absorbed it. He knew it was there. S
he knew he perceived it, but he said nothing.

  Vaile clenched her jaw. What, no lecture?

  Because they’ve proven so efficacious in the past?

  That’s never stopped you before.

  Perhaps I’ve finally come to see your point of view.

  Vaile puffed a dubious exhale. Right, and tomorrow Cephrael will appear to apologize for his part in this entire fiasco.

  She felt him form a quiet smile. He may yet surprise you...but the way you’re going about things, you won’t be around to receive his remorse. Ironies abound.

  Vaile gritted her teeth. Only her brother could so effectively use her own thoughts against her.

  I would prefer you didn’t use them against yourself, he corrected gently.

  She knew he spoke a truth. When your thoughts turned inward in criticism, there was no one to protect you from yourself.

  But all Vaile could think about were the compounding years pressing down on her heart. No diamond would come from the pressure of that compaction.

  She exhaled a slow breath of frost. The wind swept it away. Time flows differently for you.

  You don’t really believe that.

  Vaile hissed a curse in the language of the stars. What does it matter, Phaedor? There’s hardly enough magic in the world to require our agency. Why shouldn’t I join Sabrian to wait until the realm’s magic is reborn?

  Yes, why indeed?

  Vaile growled another curse at him. ‘Because Sabrian isn’t there,’—that would be his rejoinder, the meaning that was layered beneath his faintly sardonic tone. She knew his mind as well as he knew hers. They’d argued this many times.

  If she’d been unequivocally decided, he would’ve let her go, as he’d let Czavo go, and Sabrian, Irlana, Orion and Sybil...so many of them now in the stars.

  Or, perhaps he would’ve fought her tooth and claw to the bitter end. She was the oldest and he the youngest. Some harmony in this connection had always bound them to each other more closely than to the rest...though she’d usually preferred Czavo’s company. He hadn’t been so didactic.

  Phaedor was quiet for a long time.

  She could hear his argument: ‘Would you really be willing to take that risk, Vaile? Abdicate all cause, all care, all custody? For if you leave the realm and the Balance fails to shift...’

  ‘I trust you to manage it,’ she would reply. ‘You won’t let the game fail.’

  ‘Won’t I?’ he would challenge. ‘You know my views on their age-old contention. It isn’t our place to rewrite the stars.’

  ‘But we should let the two of them destroy all creation in their belligerence?’ She would protest heatedly.

  ‘And how exactly will you solve their argument by absconding into the aether to wait it out with the others?’

  ‘Who’s to say that isn’t exactly what Balance has been requiring of us all along?’ she would snap. ‘It’s been obvious how little the realm needs us for an embarrassing number of centuries. We’re relics from an age long past, Phaedor. We cannot help now but interfere in the pattern. The best thing we can do for the realm is to leave it.’

  Whereupon, he would reply with infuriating equanimity, ‘If you truly believed that, you would’ve left long ago.’

  On the other end of their binding, Phaedor said nothing.

  With the rest of the argument continuing to scroll out in her head, Vaile growled at him, Have you nothing to say?

  He mentally smirked at her. What need, when you’re playing both parts so effectively?

  Vaile bit back a retort. The matter of whether she should stay or go would be settled soon enough.

  Phaedor had called it cowardly, the way she’d maneuvered events to force Balance to choose instead of having to make the choice herself.

  That was her whole plan, the reason she refused help, refused to heal herself. Either deyjiin’s singularity would win out or somehow her body would. The latter would prove—to her rationale at least—that Balance still needed her involvement in the realm.

  Phaedor knew instinctively what she was doing, which was why he didn’t push her to let him heal her. Undoubtedly because he expected his point would be proven out instead of hers.

  Björn hadn’t healed her because she’d asked him not to.

  Across the sleeping land, a spark flared on the second strand. Vaile’s gaze shifted to its location.

  Someone’s coming. I must go.

  She felt her brother’s sudden reticence like a ship dragging its anchor, hauling against her thoughts. There was something important he wasn’t telling her. Don’t do anything you’ll actually regret, was all he said.

  I have no room for more regret, she replied as she summoned the fifth to shift her forms. I am overflowing with it.

  ***

  Demetrio Consuevé knew that he was destined for great things.

  The day he’d been born, his lady mother had exclaimed, ‘You are a gift from the gods!’ Then she’d shoved him onto a wet nurse’s teat and as far as he recalled had never looked at him again.

  But that didn’t change the facts.

  The problem was just that he’d been born ten years too late.

  Ten years could make a big difference. When Demetrio was young, it was the difference between gaining the eyes of the lovely ladies or having his cheeks pinched by the decrepit ones. Later, at the Sormitáge, it was the difference between comfortably peering through the high window into the girls’ dormitory baths or having to stand on some other bloke’s back to see over the ledge.

  If he’d had ten more years under his belt before Malachai had fractured his sanity into a million little Shades, Demetrio would’ve had his rings; he’d have been standing tall with the Companions on Tiern’aval, not skulking in some Sormitáge hall watching the Empress’s Adeptus pace protective ruts around them. Ten years and he could’ve shared in the glory of the Companions’ attempted coup!

  For want of ten years, he’d missed his window. He never had forgiven his mother for that. Demetrio felt like he’d been trying to find another open window ever since.

  Funny how life didn’t ever really get better. You’d kind of expect it to. You’d kind of think that if you went through it long enough, toiled enough, suffered enough, dealt with enough idiots—you know, paid your dues—you’d expect a little return on your investment.

  Like what you’d expect from a fine wine. If you coddled it, kept it cool and resting on its side, it was supposed to improve with age. But one wrong move, you know? The wrong conditions, the wrong handling, and all you’d get after years of waiting was vinegar.

  Demetrio had been waiting for maturity on his investment in life for over three bloody centuries. It was high time life paid up.

  “What’s taking so gods-damned long, Dallen?” Demetrio shouted over the heads of the others standing in front of him.

  The Nodefinder Dallen, who was preparing the way for their travels, was somewhere on the other side of a hundred mercenaries and out of sight of Demetrio, lost in the shifting river-light of the Pattern of the World.

  Demetrio had thought about leading the charge to the sa’reyth himself. Then he’d realized that was stupid. Kings always had a vanguard preceding their arrival. He would go last and appear the triumphant king.

  Besides, someone needed to hold the anchor in Alorin while Dallen mapped the way. Otherwise, they’d all get flung hither and yon on the Pattern of the World.

  Only, now—being at the rear holding an anchor in Alorin—he couldn’t see where they were going. A hundred heads were in the way, and the Pattern’s brightly shifting light kept making his eyes water.

  It was different when you were the one linking the nodes. You didn’t notice the light as much. Standing at the back of the mass of bodies, the light was blinding.

  From somewhere ahead, Dallen shouted irritably back at him, “Do you want to do this, Consuevé?”

  Demetrio assuredly did not want to do it. The little prick knew that. “Just hurry up!”

 
; The men between Demetrio and Dallen started grumbling about how long they’d been standing on the Pattern, scratching their arses.

  Dallen made a scathing remark about possibly losing some of them in transit, at which point they shut their mouths.

  ‘You’ll need a competent Nodefinder to locate the ley line to the sa’reyth on the world grid.’

  That’s what Leyd had said. A competent Nodefinder. That’s why Demetrio was standing at the back.

  Whatever. He didn’t think competence was worth all the hype. Competent people were usually the ones in the front of everything, which meant they were the first ones to lose their heads. Why else did the lords always march at the end of the bloody army? Because the competent people were leading it. As long as he got things done, Demetrio didn’t give a rat’s ass about being competent at it.

  See, he could think these things. He was deep. He could have introspective thoughts. He ruminated. He bloody loved ruminating.

  It never occurred to him to apply the fruits of his ruminations to better conditions in his own life, of course. That was taking ruminating a step too far. But all that deep thinking, all that philosophical stuff? Hell, he could keep pace with the best of them.

  Consuevé sniffed.

  His nose itched. He held a weapon in each hand, so he couldn’t scratch it. He rubbed the appendage against his coat sleeve instead and inadvertently bonked the guy in front of him with the flat of his sword.

  The man glared at him.

  Consuevé sniffed again.

  He might’ve been getting a cold.

  It was that piss-hole, Ivarnen. He never got colds when he spent the season in Rimaldi. The southern summers lasted so long that they had snow in Hallovia before Rimaldi felt the first hint of chill. But summer in Saldaria might as well have been monsoon season, and now it was autumn and he hadn’t once seen the bloody sun.

  Consuevé sniffed again. “What the hell is taking you so long, Dallen, you prick?”

  “Consuevé, shut your bloody snot hole or come do this yourself!”

  Demetrio considered the idea newly, weighing its merits, but in the end, he was just too fond of his head. And Leyd had been rather specific about needing a hundred men to take down his sister. Better all hundred were in front of him, even though they had a foolproof plan. Demetrio knew it was foolproof because someone competent had thought it up.