Earthstone

by P. M. Biswas

  Nala looked straight at Loren, her eyes unwavering, asking. It was an unspoken question: Will you do this for us? Will you do this for your people? For the Seer?

  And Loren, being Loren—the daft, noble dolt who was so dutiful that he’d spent his life all but erasing his true self—nodded. To him, this might just be the culmination of a long series of erasures—the ultimate erasure of death.

  Bitter bile churned in Tam’s stomach, which lurched with a sickening finality. Loren was going to do this. He was going to sacrifice himself.

  Loren carefully, tenderly transferred Soma’s head onto Nala’s lap. Then he got up and took the Stone with him. He cupped it gingerly, for it was still in its molten state, its center dissolved into the very essence of magic.

  “I will buy you time,” Loren said to Nala. “You, Tam, and the Seer. You must take Soma to a ledge on the south side, where you have the most likelihood of going unharmed. I… I will swallow the Stone and will proceed to the summit by myself.”

  “I am sorry, my prince,” Nala apologized, more heartfelt than Tam had ever seen her. “I would have volunteered myself for the ritual were I not the only Sentinel present, capable of guiding the survivors back down the mountain afterward. It is my sincere regret that I cannot offer myself in your stead.”

  Loren smiled tremulously through his tears. “Do not regret this, Sentinel. You have achieved what my father asked of you, and more. It has been an honor to have spent my last days with you.”

  Nala bowed her head again, just as she had with the Seer. “The honor is mine,” she said, choked with sorrow. “I shall tell the king of your bravery.”

  “Bravery?” Loren was still shaking, struggling to steady his clasp on the Stone. “That’s not what this is, Nala. It’s necessity. Nothing more.”

  Tam sprang to her feet, suddenly furious. “That’s what bravery is, you blithering—” Now Tam understood why Emeraude had once called her brave, when all Tam had been was afraid. Tam grabbed Loren’s sleeve, almost upsetting the Stone. “Last days? Last days? Sod that. There has to be another way.”

  “There isn’t. Tam,” Loren said, and his voice quavered, as if it was saying Tam’s name that was the last straw for him, the only goodbye he couldn’t bear to say. “Tam, there is no other way. It has to be me.”

  Loren didn’t touch Tam, didn’t so much as hold her hand, like he’d lose his nerve if he did. He was just a boy. Gods, he was just a boy—a frightened, uncertain boy condemned to death too early. And it showed.

  With a final lingering glance, Loren took in Tam’s features like he’d never see them again. Then he stepped away from her and lifted the bowl to his lips. It was a fateful repetition of Soma’s actions. Tam’s sight narrowed and darkened, tunneling as if it were her own life hanging in the balance, not Loren’s.

  Maybe it was the bond. Maybe it was the friendship between them that Tam had never acknowledged, a friendship she now lamented not acknowledging. It was too late. It was always too late. She had been too late to thank her parents for their love, too late to spar with Dale, and now, too late to tell Loren how important he was to her. Perhaps Loren could feel it through their bond, but was that enough? Would it ever be enough? Would it not always eat away at Tam like a rot of the conscience, that she had failed her friend even in this?

  The bond.

  That was when it dawned on Tam. Soma had never said it had to be an elf that unleashed the Stone. She had said that only elven magic could unlock it, but didn’t Tam, bonded as she was to Loren, have some elven magic in her? A trace amount, as Soma had explained, but just enough for the Stone to detect?

  Tam moved faster than light itself, instinct taking over before her thought had even completed itself, before her purpose had even transmitted itself to Loren through the bond. Tam barreled into Loren, her spear knocking Loren’s arms aside as she dove under them and claimed the Stone for herself.

  Loren screamed, perceiving belatedly what Tam intended, but he could not stop her. Tam was already drinking from the Stone. She was barely conscious of doing it, because Loren’s scream resounded within her, not just in her ears but in her soul, the bond sparking alive within her as sheer, unadulterated magic poured into her. It was a deluge of power that sang in her veins, a bolt of lightning that jolted through her. It singed her throat as she drank it, her tongue tasting of coppery ash.

  The earth tilted on its axis. Everything slid sideways, and then Tam was falling, hitting the dirt and retching and retching, but nothing came up. Her vision sizzled and wavered, every form and motion around her shining in varying shades and intensities of silver. All the other colors bled away, fading as the sky did before an eclipse, leaving nothing but that throbbing, omnipresent silver in its wake. Gods, this was—this was magic, and it was everywhere. It was life itself. Was this what Soma always saw? How had she maintained her sanity after seeing this? After seeing nothing but this for a thousand years?

  Someone gathered her up and helped her back to her feet. It was Loren, and Tam only recognized him because she could inherently distinguish the precise tinge of silvery white that was Loren’s self, flickering like a flame before her eyes. She couldn’t see Loren’s body. She could see nothing as she could before—there were no boundaries, no limits to anything. That limitlessness was rupturing her mind. It was a devastating, inescapable disintegration that rattled through her like a hurricane, gaining momentum, picking up fragments of her as it spun.

  “I’m… I’m blind. Loren, I’m blind, I can’t see—I mean, I can, but not—not—”

  “Breathe.” Loren sounded breathless himself, wracked by grief. It was a grief that Tam could feel through their bond, but it was just one impression among a trillion, drowned out by a cacophony of light and noise and silver, silver all around her. “Breathe, Tam. You’re not blind like Soma is, it’s just that the Stone has possessed you and has taken over your eyes. We have to make it to the peak.”

  “We?” Tam fought to free herself from Loren. “No, you have to go with Nala and Soma. I’ll… I’ll go up to the peak without you.”

  “How will you get there? You can’t see.”

  “I can see enough. And what I can’t see, I can feel.” Tam extended her hands out in front of her, and her fingertips caught on a silky tangle that she vaguely identified as Loren’s hair. “Let me go.”

  “Like hell I will.” Loren seized Tam around the waist and hoisted her up onto his back. Tam scrabbled for purchase against Loren’s skinny shoulders, existence once again rocking around her.

  “What are you doing?” Tam hissed.

  “Staying with you.” Loren staggered under Tam’s weight before he found his footing. Then they started to ascend, Loren grunting with effort. He swayed and halted, swayed and halted, as if climbing the mountain step by step, hauling himself upward. “I can’t let you die alone. I won’t let you die alone.”

  “That was the plan, you twit!” Tam shouted, enraged. “What use is it if you die along with me?”

  “Be still, or I’ll topple off Mount Zivan altogether and your sacrifice will be moot.”

  Tam quieted, if only because the both of them dying due to an argument would be too anticlimactic after what she’d just gone through.

  Besides, they had a world to save.

  Tam would save Loren too. Somehow. She had the Stone within her, and though it possessed her body, her sight, and increasingly her mind, she still had control over it. Somewhat. It was a tenuous control, liable to snap like an ever-thinning thread, because, just as Soma had warned, Tam was shattering around the power she had ingested. It was too huge for any being to accommodate without bursting like the shell of a seed around a sprout—a sprout that shot uncontrollably outward, uncaring of the cracked husk it left behind.

  Tam wasn’t a husk yet. She would hang on to whatever control she had until she’d dispatched her mission, until she’d shored up a dome of earth to shelter Loren from the landslide. The picture arose in her psyche as if the magic had made th
e suggestion itself, twining seamlessly with her intentions even as it prepared to surge out of her and into the surrounding earth.

  Tam knew they had reached the summit by the sudden violent whipping of the wind around them on the exposed mountaintop. Silver whirled around her in eddies that sparkled and spiraled. It would have almost been lovely had the situation not been so dire.

  Loren set her down with such care that Tam did not even stumble, and then he said thickly, as if it wrecked him to say it, “Now, Tam. You must unleash the Stone.” Loren retreated behind her and enfolded her in an embrace. At her back, Tam felt Loren’s warmth, and at her nape, Tam felt the press of his face, the wetness of his tears. “I’m with you,” he whispered. “I’m right here with you. Do it.”

  Do it.

  A serenity overtook Tam, even amidst the gradual eroding of her will that she now saw as if from far away, from somewhere above herself. The Earthstone’s magic was rising within her, poised to drown out her awareness at any moment.

  But that awareness had expanded, sinking into the very roots of the mountain, all the way across to the overpass where Danis’s army was stationed. Thousands of feet marched steadily and inexorably through the pass, and to Tam, it was as though those feet marched upon her very skin, the footfalls echoing down to her bones. The mountain was her body, the ledges and outcrops her limbs, and the summit her eyes. She had become the mountain. A single sweep of her arm would send the mountainside crumbling, crushing the army below.

  Now was the time. There would be none other. In the shrinking, splintering seconds before the magic utterly consumed her, Tam let go.

  She let her will course through her and through the mountain itself. Fall, she commanded it. To the north and to the west. Crush those that are soulless and preserve those that are not. Go. Go forth. In her mind Tam saw Danis’s army as a mass of leaden black, a cancerous absence of life, a void where there should be a pulsing river of silver. Destroy them all.

  It began with a rumble—a rumble resembling that of thunder, thrumming with electricity like the flash at the center of a storm cloud. The ground beneath Tam and Loren quaked. Particles of dust rose into the air, a glittering curtain of silver suspended before Tam’s very eyes. A distant roar drew nearer and nearer, reverberating from the mountain’s core to emerge as a deafening crack.

  The tide of magic rising within Tam swelled to a towering crest before slamming downward, like a giant fist pulverizing the earth. The entire north side of the mountain came down with a boom so loud that it was almost beyond hearing, more a vibration than a sound, punching through Tam’s eardrums even as Loren’s arms tightened around her.

  Loren.

  Tam had ensured that Nala and Soma would be untouched on the south side of the mountain, but Loren… Loren was right here with her. Like he had promised to be.

  Save him, Tam pleaded with the Earthstone, because she had to, she just had to. The magic was leaving her as it did her bidding, the wave that had risen within her now ebbing, taking her consciousness with it. Taking her into death. Save him, please. Take me, but save him.

  It could not be borne that Loren would die like this, that he would die with Tam only because of a bond that had been inflicted on him by chance.

  Beyond the crashing around them—thunderclap after thunderclap, with the very ground caving beneath them—Tam heard Loren sob into her ear.

  “It wasn’t just the bond, Tam. It wasn’t just….”

  But Loren was lying, because just before Tam could leave her body, Loren dragged her back, his life force twining with hers just as his fingers had twined with hers yesternight. Just before she could drift away, there he was, anchoring her, their bond a wire of crackling gold that tied Tam to him.

  The fool. He’d go with her if he kept this up. Tam tried to sever herself from him even as the Stone sapped the life from her. She would die here, but Loren would not. Tam would insist on it with her last breath.

  When the price of many lives is only one, then it is a price that must be paid, Soma had said.

  Not this one, Tam thought fiercely, ordering the Earthstone to form a dome around Loren as she had envisioned. Never this one. Never Loren.

  The order used up what remained of the Stone’s power. The earth that had been buckling beneath them curved up in an arc of rock, blocking them from the hail of stone that was seemingly descending from the sky but was really the spray resulting from Zivan’s partial ruin. The mountaintop on which they stood had been pushed southward, where it would be protected.

  Loren would live. Loren had to live.

  Yes, the Stone answered.

  The magic within Tam receded, like the ocean drawing back over a beach, taking the sand with it.

  For she was only sand, in the end. Grain by grain, atom by atom, she was reabsorbed by the silver that shimmered and pulsated around her. Her identity as Tamsin Bladeborn, as a finite being, was washing away in the sea of infinity.

  Goodbye, comrade, Tam said to Loren through the fraying thread of their bond, which was stretched to breaking point as Tam traveled farther and farther away from it, past the veil that separated the living from the dead. Be well.

  And then Tam hurtled into the abyss.

  THE ABYSS was very comfy. Tam had to give it that. It was fluffy—exceedingly fluffy, even, like a cloud made of down feathers—but it was also warm. Tam could not have been warmer had she been an egg nestled under the breast of a plump mother hen.

  Why birds and feathers were featuring so prominently in Tam’s imagination, she had no clue, but it must be because of all this softness surrounding her. Loren’s arms hadn’t been this soft when they’d surrounded her. They’d been bony and awkward and, frankly, a bit uncomfortable.

  Not that Loren would welcome constructive criticism on his hugging technique—if such criticisms were ever offered, which they probably weren’t. Social mores, and all that. Politeness. Tam wasn’t suited to it, but she had to try. Else she’d never be a functioning member of society.

  Except that Tam wasn’t sure she was functioning at all. Afloat as she was in this blessed softness, there was a persistent doubt at the back of her mind that this was all an illusion, that she was forgetting some vital piece of information.

  Her body was missing. That was it. There was all this softness around Tam, but what was she feeling it with? Where were her hands? Her legs? Where was her skin? It was just gone, like a sock pulled off a foot, revealing what was within it. But Tam wasn’t even a foot, was she? She had no toes to wriggle. She had nothing but her… her-ness. What was she without the flesh that contained her, that animated her? What was a fire without its kindling? What was smoke without air?

  Oh, Tam realized. Silly me. I’m dead.

  It wasn’t as alarming an epiphany as it should’ve been. There was a twinge of sadness within her, that she wouldn’t have any more of Loren’s hugging, or of Kay’s handholding, or of Maryada’s sparring. That she wouldn’t ever have to whinge about the wateriness of the gruel served at the dorm. That she wouldn’t ever have to grimace as she scrubbed the mud off her boots.

  They were small things. Everyday things. It wasn’t the big things that Tam missed, funnily enough—the significant things, the oaths she had sworn, the battles she had trained to fight. No, it was the simplicity of being in a body that she missed most of all—the sunlight on her face, the scrape of her spear against her palms when she hadn’t polished it enough, the prickling trickle of sweat down her back.

  But these were just flashes of memory. They vanished into the softness which surrounded her, and as time went on—did time even exist here?—the flashes of memory became less relevant. Less bothersome. Names and faces began to merge.

  And it was all right. It was more than all right. Tam had done what she’d pledged to do. She had served. She had protected. As her memories dwindled away, only that knowledge endured, and it soothed her back to sleep.

  WHEN TAM next woke—if it could be called waking—the abyss was just
as comfy, but now she had toes to wriggle in it. Toes! She’d thought they’d gone! She had fingers, too, spasming back to life amidst that softness, and ears that registered the rustling of sheets.

  Tam didn’t understand. Had she not shuffled off her mortal coil? What was it doing shuffling itself back onto her? Once again the image of a sock being slid back onto a foot entered her mind. Why was she so preoccupied with socks? First feathers, and now socks. The afterlife had clearly made a muddle of her.

  A name was spoken—her own name, if Tam wasn’t mishearing it—and when she turned toward it, as slowly as a fly rotating in honey, she caught weeping, as well.

  Don’t cry, she said, but what emerged was, “Drfgh.” Her jaw appeared to have locked. Her throat had dried and stiffened, like a kitchen sponge left out in the sun. Her vocal cords had hardened into toothpicks, sharp-tipped and poking at the base of her tongue. Ack.

  Water. Water, water, water. Where could a girl get water around here?

  Tam fumbled vaguely in the direction of what she assumed would be a bedside table, since she was—obviously, miraculously—on a bed. Her belief that she was in the afterlife was being swiftly replaced by the disappointing awareness that she was not, because the afterlife couldn’t be this unpleasant. The glorious softness of the blankets around her was no longer sufficient to drown out the insistent notifications of her body.

  She had a body. How novel it was to be in possession of a flesh-bag again! Her soul had been crammed back into it like mince into a sausage, leaving her feeling overfull and about to split. Her skin sat oddly on her, at once too tight and too loose, like an ill-woven coat. If Astar had been stitching her back together, He’d done a poor job of it. Gods shouldn’t try to be tailors. They were terrible at it. Tam did neater work on the holes in her clothes, and she was renowned for being awful at sewing.

  Eventually Tam’s fingertips encountered a cool, curved, glassy surface, and she groped at it ineffectually. Whoever was weeping theatrically beside her finally hearkened to her plight and made themselves useful, snatching what Tam presumed was a jug from her feeble grip. There was a delicious pouring sound—the tinkling of water. Yum, water.