Burning Ashes

by James Bennett

  London was far away now, his pain, his grief, clutched like a postcard in his heart, the edges burnt. The dragon city. My city … Here, in the orchard, he found himself whole and man-shaped, washed up on the infinite shore. Avalon shimmered, a helix far below.

  The Isle of the Apples. The Font of All Worlds.

  As he heard his name whisper through his head, Ben detected something wrong with the light. Once silver, lit by the core of a cracked moon, the leys spiralling through the gulf, the scene before him had drastically dimmed. Everything held a familiar hue. Familiar and unwelcome.

  And it was cold. The chill of the nether pressed upon him, prickling across his suit. His body, encased in crimson armour, couldn’t quite withstand its touch, a troubling sensation, to say the least. Somewhere, he guessed, the ice was melting from his flesh, and here, he found its mirror, the breath of the abyss kissing the orchard. The meadow, suspended like a leaf on a tree, could no longer keep out the chill.

  Nursing his inner heat, he climbed to his feet. As though in defiance, he stretched out his limbs, checking that he still lived. There was no way of knowing for sure, of course. In this place, he could breathe and move, free of injury, but he grasped his circumstance well enough, for all its discomfort. Only his soul tarried here, plucked from the material plane by the queen, Our Lady of the Barrows, and spooled in across the endless gulf, caught on a string of dreams.

  She’s your creator, of sorts. She can do that.

  But this was no dream. It was an audience. The knowledge irked him, making him rankle at the thought, a leash around his neck. Whenever he passed out, when he drew close to death, it seemed that the Lady could reach him, call him at whim. Great. He’d come to find Nimue’s whims questionable, to put it mildly. An extension of his feelings about Von Hart, the pale-faced, absent traitor. Having drawn the eyes of the High House, summoning the Fay to Earth, the envoy had greeted his success with triumph. With blind hope. His ambition had overridden the grief that he should’ve felt. His reluctant sacrifice. The loss of Jia Jing. The envoy’s plan had worked, all the same, and then some. The first time Ben had come to the garden, the Lady had told him the consequences. And he hadn’t liked the sound of it then.

  Even as we speak, a company of Fay rides across the nether, bound for the gate to your world.

  After all he’d been through, to China and back, he wished he could share Von Hart’s enthusiasm. The fairy’s eyes in the crypt, bright with longing, the loneliness of ages, would stay with Ben for as long as he lived. Which, all things considered, might not be long.

  The light and the chill were one thing, the stench quite another. As he stood, he pulled a face, his lips curling in revulsion. Ugh. The scent, sickly and sweet, coiled in his nostrils, the breath of a thousand graves. Queasily, he looked around him, seeking the source of the pall, mentally bracing for the sight of a corpse. Despite the surrounding vegetation, the smell was meaty somehow. Rotten. A glance over his shoulder revealed the little brook, once bubbling like laughter, diamonds spilling over the edge of the sward. Now it ran sluggish and black, choked by weeds and scum. Slop dripped into the gulf with all the lustre of shit.

  Not good. On further inspection, Ben taking hesitant steps into the nearest row of trees, he found the truth of the matter. The ground squelched under his feet, mulch oozing between his toes, forcing him to put a hand to his mouth, his eyes watering. It was the fruit, carpeting the ground. All of the fruit. Withered, dull, the strange apples formed a pebblelike road into the gloom, the ground soft with putrescence. As far as he could see, the branches around him stretched gnarled and bare, devoid of their glimmering bounty. Instead, it appeared that a storm had swept through the orchard, destroying the cosmic crop.

  Cosmic, yeah. When Ben recalled the seeded metaphor of worlds on worlds, he couldn’t suppress a shiver, looking upon the failed harvest with a stab of fear.

  But there was worse. Glancing up through the trees, he spied the palace, the walls looming in the distance, the towering battlements and spires. Crystalline and pink, that’s how he remembered them, a fairy castle (of sorts) in the clouds, a jewel in the immensity. No. It was more than that: a spindle of realities, of countless worlds, cultivated by the Fallen Ones, the void-travelling Fay.

  Not so now. The palace rose as black, as dull as the nether around it, reminding him of a certain mirror, an octagon of unmarked wood framing a bottomless pit. And there he’d strayed, through the door of Creation, into the province of ghosts … The palace looked haunted, all right. Its chambers empty, stripped of the echoes of long-ago laughter, lost in time and forgotten. Whatever glory, whatever beauty it once held, it had long since decayed, presumably stricken by the same blight that had ravaged the orchard. Imagining its abandoned halls, the wind singing around a cobwebbed throne, he felt the coals snuff out in his belly, plunging him into dread.

  A worm gnaws at the heart of things …

  This had become his mantra. A silent lament. And he’d come to suspect the nature of the worm too, invisible and ravenous. Not time, he reckoned, although that was part of it. Not time, but something else. Something more … intimate.

  Magic is souring …

  Ben had seen masks before. He’d seen illusions, both in physical form and in the mind, the belief in a comfortable lie. Jia had shown him the truth and, a ghost, a revenant, the sin-you haunted him still. Like the glass of the Eight Hand Mirror, the illusion had shattered, the scattering shards carrying away his world. The Lore. The Sleep. His ancient heart. And what had the Lady shown him, the first time he’d walked here? A garden. A dream, no doubt. A thriving hub of magic. Eternal. Bright.

  A memory?

  He’d seen King Arthur, a puppet of bones, dancing on strings of blue light. The circles of protection, the indecipherable glyphs fading. Winking out in a valley. Across the sea. In a city park. Here he saw the same corruption, the same pestilent glow, the flesh of magic rotting away. The real state of the place. He didn’t know what it meant. Couldn’t quite grasp the sense of it. That the souring of the earth should reach even here, into the depths of the nether. Lapping at Avalon’s shores …

  One thing was for sure. The sight sat at odds with everything the Lady had told him.

  We are lost. Fallen …

  Her voice led him on, between the trees. Every step he took refreshed the stink around him, fruit splitting under his feet. Despite his unease, he was almost relieved to see her, this fairy lady from another world. Nimue … He found her in a glade, kneeling upon the ground. With her back turned to him, her braids coiled high and pale in the dark, he traced the line of her spine, her trembles betraying her tears.

  Hands covering her face, the Lady fell silent as he drew near, clutching at dignity. Or so it seemed. Like the last time he’d come here, the wondrous visions and her confessions, he wondered how much of this was for show, designed to secure his allegiance. To spur him on to bring her the sword, the prize she so desperately wanted.

  Only with the blade can I reignite the circles and restore your world.

  That’s what she’d told him. Nevertheless, by her own admission that wasn’t the whole of it. And the light around him, inky and dim, shared the same shade as her gown. The same shade as the failing circles. The same shade as a dead king’s eyes. It was all connected, he got that now. The magic was a plague that had taken them all, perverting everything good and pure.

  “Arthur is dead,” he told her, then grunted, shrugging off his portentous tone. “Again.”

  “Yes. We sensed his passing,” she said. “The flames of a city. The screams. A beacon in the dark. Guiding us to the earth.”

  Ben swallowed, her words sinking in. When he thought of the scale of it, the dead king, the towering thorn wall, the wooden idol in Trafalgar Square, the hundreds, if not thousands who had died, his fingertips bit into his palms. It was her casual tone, however, that floored him.

  “Typical,” he said, hating the ache in his voice. And in a way, he wasn’t surprised, havi
ng doubted her from the start. Well, she was Fay, wasn’t she? And Camlann was a long time ago. Von Hart, he realised then, wasn’t the only one who’d changed. “You’re as fucked up and twisted as your magic. The king wasn’t triggered by some kind of failsafe. You raised him, didn’t you? You raised Arthur to buy you time.”

  “The way is long. And long forgotten,” she said, as if that served as an answer. “We could trace the echoes of the harp, of course, but time was of the essence. We required a beacon, leading us on. And we would turn the eyes of the world away as we travelled through the dark. So yes, we reached out to our dead son. Our dead Example, deep in the mountain. What else could we do? We lack the maps and the power of old. Only one gate leads to your world, dragon. One road, tangled with all the others. And it was broken.”

  Was? He didn’t much like the sound of that either.

  “Forgotten,” he shot back. “Like you forgot us. Your children.”

  And in the time since this race had left the earth, it seemed that the Remnants were not the only ones to have dwindled and declined, changed, warped by the ages. The souring had reached the High House too. The fact of it was all around him, in the dark palace walls and the rotten orchard. In the stench in the air. As his gorge rose in his throat, sickened by the revelation, Ben felt another crack in his heart, a lingering hope evaporating. That one day the Fay would return. That the Queen’s Troth would come true. That, even after all, Remnants and humans would learn to live in peace and get their happy ending. Begin a new golden age. Even after all, he’d still believed. Somewhere deep down in his soul.

  No more.

  You fool.

  Instead, there was only an end. He knew that now. Somehow, he’d always known. Recent trials had forced him to look, rubbing his face in the fact. Having half-slept his way through the centuries, he was more awake than ever. Awake and stranded in a nightmare.

  The Lady’s confession left him with a question.

  “Why, then?” he asked, taking another step, the ground giving a little beneath his feet, slick and rank. “Why bother to return? I thought you said that you were out there, seeding worlds or whatever.” All worlds hold the power, the potential to become something more. He remembered her words only too well, the measureless scope of them, prompting further fears. He funnelled them into his confusion, pressing his anguish upon her. “Why not just leave us to die?”

  Her hands fell into her lap, but she didn’t turn around. Perhaps she couldn’t face him, or so he longed to believe. The cold in his veins, his galloping heart, told him otherwise, of course. What was she keeping from him?

  “Oh, we have already told you, Benjurigan,” she said. “Not that you would listen. Long ago, in the history of history, the First-Born walked as gods, unchained and bright in the cosmos. We shaped worlds. Breathed life into the void. And yet our ambition destroyed us. There was … a storm. A silence in heaven. And we were cast down. We became the Fallen. Shadows of our former selves.”

  The Fay. Yeah, I’ve heard this part. But …

  “Perhaps we were angels once,” she said. “And echoes of our glory remained. For a while, at least. Alone, adrift, we sailed the void, following the map of our shattered magic, the silver veins of Creation. Mighty, we came through the dark, visiting worlds we’d made and forgotten, trying to recover our vanished art. Our power. In great cities under the sea. On mountaintops that speared the moon. In deserts of glass and forests of gold, travelling ever onwards. We were desperate. Searching, searching … And in time, we came to your world.”

  “Your precious Example,” Ben said. “In the end, it was all about you.”

  The Lady had told him, yes. All about golden dreams and noble aspirations. The grand evolution of Man. The white walls of Camelot. A legendary king, a mortal paragon to lead all into the light. How could he forget the Fay crypt in the caverns under London, the marble figures entwined, locked in warped copulation? The carnal experiments of long ago, melding human with alien flesh, giving birth to the Remnants. How Nimue’s words stung him now, ringing with the bells of untruth.

  Are we not flesh, Benjurigan? Alas, our godly provenance lingers in spirit alone. Like you, like them, we are corporeal, creatures of blood and bone, albeit infused with magic. Creatures of love and hope. Of desire …

  “Poor beast,” the Lady said. “Did you honestly imagine that you were so special? A lizard granted human shape, filled with hunger and fire?” She shook her head, but despite her sympathetic tone, he could tell that she was laughing at him. At his pain. “Did you think that the Remnants were the height of our experiments? It wounds us to tell you that you were but one of many. Orchard upon orchard. World upon world.”

  Fingers growing sharp, blood dripped from Ben’s fists, unseen flowers blooming on the ground.

  He’d been here before. “I know this one. You weren’t just seeding worlds. You were harvesting them. And what were you hoping to find? Let me take a wild guess.”

  “Redemption. Ascension. Revival,” she said, without a beat. A shred of shame. “Is that not the ambition of all who fall? Do not all gods long to return, craving worship, the fuel of belief? You’ve seen it yourself. A goddess. A ghost. Risen from the grave.”

  Ben had a mental image of playing cards fluttering around the envoy, liquid in the gloom of Club Zauber. In Berlin, a couple of years back.

  The Long Sleep is simply a human term for a universal fact. All myths have their season, and in their time, pass. Dreams, monsters, ghosts, gods …

  This was all one. All part of the same story.

  “You … the First-Born created her. A serpent who became something … more.”

  “Atiya was one who showed us the way. That a return was indeed possible. Alas, she was destroyed, centuries ago. Only a memory remains.” Ben, who’d felt the sting of that memory, in black claws and lightning, begged to differ. But the Lady went on. “Later experiments came close to our goal, but we did not count on human pride. At the last, we were refused. Arthur chose war. He shattered the harp. We lost everything. Years of toil, of magical endeavour. In his folly, he cursed your world to remain base. Animal. Enslaved by emotion. Blighted by disbelief. Doomed to wither and die.” By the turn of the ages. By the lie. The Lore. He knew this part too. “And so we departed. We … moved on.”

  Now Ben recalled the painting hanging in du Sang’s tomb, the blazing black sun on the rise, the ghostly forms moving towards it. The Eight Hand Mirror, the last door of Creation, sealed by a charm and yet left intact. Von Hart standing with the fragments at his feet, the shattered Cwyth in the snow. There was a secret here, he was sure of it. Another hidden truth. But the shape of it escaped him.

  He spoke with embers in his throat. “To some other poor sod of a world, I guess. Did you abandon that one too?”

  “Oh, we have reaped thousands,” she said, in the same dismissive manner. “The God-seed, once planted, is hard to tend. Too easily, the scions become tainted. Unstable. With the Pendragon, we came so close to its highest expression, preparing to distil the juice of dreams, drink and make the climb to the heavens, back into the light.” She looked up, gazing at some imagined star, perhaps, a place that Ben couldn’t see. “We failed. In the end, all we birthed were monsters. Divinity evaded us.”

  Remnants.

  Here, then, was her offered truth. Ben couldn’t know where her experiments would lead her, what essence the Fay had hoped to squeeze from the process, the mix of magic with human flesh. He didn’t want to know, the fire inside him devouring curiosity, leaving only disgust. After all he’d suffered, the long, lonely years … and here she was, this otherworldly Lady, this queen, telling him that he was nothing. Less than nothing. A discarded scrap of a cosmos-spanning soup.

  The wisdom weighed him down, a stone in his chest.

  “You still haven’t answered my question.” He kept his voice low, tamping down rage in his quest for understanding. “You’re saying that your Troth was bullshit. That you never promised to return, isn�
�t that right? But you also told me that you left your gate behind. One of your doors. Locked, sure, but unbroken.” The fact didn’t make sense. It was a contradiction. A mystery. “Why?”

  At this, she stood, her gown swishing, the silk drenched by muck. With a shudder, she let out her breath, speaking into the dark.

  “We told you,” she said again. “Oh, we were younger then. Foolish. Caught up in the dream, the light that shone on all Logres. Can a queen not love her king? We are Fallen, Benjurigan. And we were not untouched by desire. By hope in an impossible future. Yes, we should’ve destroyed the gate, made our peace with our failure. But what are the Fay if not one? Much like lunewrought, all of a piece. Not all in the High House agreed to embark, ride with us into the dark. We have told you, dragon. We didn’t have the heart.”

  She’d said this before. And it had remained a riddle … Until now, when he grasped some sense to it, slippery, unwelcome in his mind.

  “Wait. What are you saying? You—”

  “We are not what we were,” she continued. “Like power, like glory, love has long since flown from us. The feel of it, the taste … Perhaps we tarried too long in your world, became stained by human need. In time, we have come to see our error, small as it at first seemed. How long does the fruit stay ripe when cut from the branch? Yet the branch remains, does it not? It’s the branch, it seems, that wounds us, winding across the gulfs of time, spreading rot to the shores of Avalon itself. And so we return. Summoned by our broken harp. Reminded of our lapse in judgement. Enlightened to the source of our decline.”

  Ben’s breath rushed from him, a scatter of sparks in the gloom. He fought to stay on his feet, the stench of the fruit as he staggered to one side pouring over him. Keeping him upright, clinging to a mast of shock.