by Tammy Salyer
And what will she see—besides me, obviously? he asked, hesitating.
She’ll see through you, he said as if it were as obvious as that.
And that’s when I’ll, er, cease to be, as it were… he mused, accepting that this was not going to be something he could include in his new category of Things That Should Kill Me But Might Not.
Griggory, tellingly, didn’t answer.
Bardgrim’s Expanse, he thought. That’s the one I hope they pick, because if I’m never reminded of the Empire of Dyrrakium again, I’ll… well, I guess I won’t, will I?
With a deep internal breath, he took a step toward the mirror.
And felt something, someone beside him. Griggory?
No, a different voice said. It’s me, Mylla. I remember what you did for Vaka Aster and Ulfric. Let me, let us, do the same for you.
At that moment, he felt the others, too. Stave, Safran, Roibeard, even Griggory had moved up to him. He was surrounded by more silhouettes, amorphous and without detail, but he could still make out their individual shapes.
Are—are you all going to help me?
Of course we are. Did you think we were going to let the novicest of all novices have all the glory to himself? said Stave.
Roibeard cut in. You’re a Knight, Bardgrim. It’s going to take all of us to stop Balavad, so we’ll face this test with you, as we should all tests. As one.
Giving a nod he wasn’t sure if anyone could see, he said, As one, and stepped up to the looking glass.
The way the light streaked to either side, he half expected to see it converging into a distant point inside the celestial oval—a portal, he realized—but that was the only expectation he had. He simply couldn’t guess what he might see. And when he did see it, he still didn’t know how to describe it, and knew he never would. The only words he could find were, It is the entire Cosmos, infinity multiplied by infinity…
Then, as if a great being the size of mountains suddenly became aware of them, he sensed himself being discovered, scrutinized. At the same moment, he began to feel… the word “full” didn’t quite fit. Ballooned, as if he were being inflated, and the infinity on the other side of the portal began to move.
For a moment, vertigo overpowered him. From his side of the portal, at the periphery of his vision, the light streaked toward it. But from inside, the infinitude was moving the opposite way, toward him, and increasing in speed. He wanted to say something but found himself immobile, frozen. The others around him were equally still. He had the sense he was in a speeding Glisternaut ship hurtling into a tunnel, while at the same time the tunnel was hurtling itself at him, into him.
The sense of internal pressure increased, and he knew without a doubt he was simply going to fill to the point of exploding. He distantly thought of the mess it would make on Isle Stonering when he and the rest of the Knights did. Nothing was going to stop it. The pressure grew and grew, the light on the sides of the mirror blazed brighter and brighter, and if he could have screamed, he would have screamed louder and louder.
At the moment he thought the end would come, as the fibers of his ephemeral spirit seemed about to tear apart with fantastic force, a voice passed through his mind like the gentlest brush of cloud.
Another Mystae to welcome me back to my creation. One last sojourn before the Syzyckí Elementum.
Jaemus opened his eyes and quickly closed them again, expecting Himmingaze’s heavy rain to thump his eyeballs, and realized a moment later the rain had stopped.
Everything was silent. I’m dead? Odd to feel stones beneath my bum if I’m dead. Then he realized it wasn’t silent. He could hear water gently lapping against the shore. His eyes opened again.
For his thirty-seven anni-cycles, every time Jaemus had looked into Himmingaze’s sky, he’d seen the swirling glints and swirls of the Glister Cloud, a beautiful yet threatening cloak wrapping his world in a turbid and impenetrable shell. He’d believed before Ulfric came that he and his fellow Himmingazians would have to break through that shell to see the rest of the Cosmos and find a world that wasn’t slowly devolving into chaos. And after Ulfric, he’d learned there simply was no Cosmos outside the shell, that his realm, his reality, had been cut neatly away from it and was doomed to cease existing entirely because of the curse of the Mystae who’d banished the Creatress from her creation.
He had to admit he couldn’t entirely fathom what all that meant, but at this moment, staring into the sky over Himmingaze, he didn’t care. Because for the first time in his life, there was a sky. The Glister Cloud, the broken vessel of Lífs according to Griggory, had been made whole again. Who knew who or what it had become? But that wasn’t a concern to dwell on at the moment, because, like the illimitable night sky of Vinnr, the vision above him was open, edgeless, infinite, and filled with stars that expanded ever outward far, far beyond the limits of his sight.
They had done it, they’d broken the banishment and returned Lífs to her realm, and thereby returned Himmingaze to the Great Cosmos. What had been sundered had been remade.
And he was pretty sure he hadn’t died doing it.
Sitting up, Jaemus caught sight of the rest of the Knights on all sides of him, including Griggory. They were moving around, all breathing, staring about themselves as surprised as he was. Also, marvel of many marvels, not dead.
Aside from a residual prickling sensation in the roots of his hair and at his fingertips and even his toes, not unpleasant but noticeable, he decided he was no worse for wear. He leaned toward Knight Evernal and reached for her shoulder to gently nudge her awake but caught something in the corner of his eye near the shoreline. Hither still stood there, still half immersed in the water, and the beast’s eyes were fixed on him. Her eyes were… swirling. Like Ulfric’s, a celestial dance of silver-blue and golden light filling them.
Their gazes locked. Finally Jaemus whispered, “Creatress?”
Hither’s long body slid backward into the water, and with serpentine grace, she turned into the next riffle and was gone an instant later. He watched her, or rather the water she disappeared beneath, a moment longer. So. The Glister Cloud was gone, and a new vessel had been chosen.
He mentally poked around the edges of the idea that a slangarook, large and, according to tales, ferocious enough to consume the populations of whole cities, was now the physical embodiment of their creator. But he quickly decided this was a consideration best left for another time. As he began picking himself up, a voice unlike any human’s he’d heard—but the same as the voice he’d heard inside the Scrylle—spoke inside his mind. Mystae Bardgrim. I will remember you.
He jolted a little, then said aloud in a somewhat shaky voice, “I hope she meant that in a ‘Don’t worry, I won’t forget your birthday’ kind of way, and not a ‘I never forget the face of someone I may eat someday’ kind of way.”
“You’ve got something on your head, you do.”
He blinked and realized Stave was staring at something between Jaemus’s eyes. He lifted his hand and touched his forehead, feeling that prickle in his fingers turn into a shock when he made contact. “Am I bleeding?” he asked, unsure what was causing the sensation.
Movement next to him alerted him that Griggory had risen as well. When Jaemus looked at him, Griggory blinked, then gave him a slow, toothy grin that showed his large teeth too plainly. “By the Verities, you’ve been twice ordained!”
“Twice… huh?”
Safran, Roibeard, and Knight Evernal had finally stirred. All began to rise, and Stave grabbed Jaemus’s hand and pulled him to his feet.
“You’ve done it, haven’t you, Jaemus?” Evernal asked after taking in the calm water and sky. “You’ve saved Himmingaze.”
He blinked. Hearing it said made it feel real all of sudden. “I suppose, I, I mean we, did. All in a day’s work for a Knight, right?” His humility wasn’t feigned. It was simply that no experience in his life compared to what had just occurred, and he found he didn’t yet know how to react. What did
one do when they pulled a world from the very precipice of annihilation? Take a bow? Sing, buy their friends a round of drinks? With no answer coming to him, he looked back at Griggory and said again, “Twice what now?”
“You bear Lífs’s mark, that line like a lightning bolt on your brow, to match the star on your chin. The spark of two Verities, Jaemus. You’re both a Mystae and a Kn—”
Griggory shut his mouth abruptly and looked toward the sky just as Jaemus felt it too. The tingling of a starpath about to strike. His gaze shot to the Himmingazian ship over the temple, where the starpath tended to open, but found it missing. Where had it gone? Before the answer came, the brilliant blue pillar of starlight speared through the broken roof and vanished a moment later.
The six Knights stood motionless, those with klinkí stones now wielding them, and Safran and Griggory holding the Scrylles of Lífs and Vaka Aster. They waited.
Jaemus found his heartbeat was slow, much slower than it should have been for someone who half expected to see an army of malformed soldiers belonging to a Verity bent on enslaving the Cosmos come through the temple doors. He counted six beats until whoever had arrived appeared.
It was not even close to who he expected. A woman, shortish, older than him and pale-skinned like Griggory, emerged, flanked on either side by two quite familiar birds the size of a human. She stopped at the top of the steps and gazed down.
But it was even more surprising to hear Ulfric’s voice, apparently channeled through a pendant she wore around her neck. “Hello, Knights. What did we miss?”
Chapter Eight
Statues could not have stood more still than the six Knights on the shore of Isle Stonering when Symvalline walked out of the shrine. The moment only lasted a breath, then nearly everyone spoke at once.
“Sym, is it truly you?” Safran cried, using a Fenestros.
“Verities eyes, I don’t believe it,” Roibeard whispered.
“Hah!” Stave shouted. “I knew no scabby Verity slag could stop you, Symvalline.”
But Mylla remained quiet, circumspect, before asking, “… Isemay?”
Symvalline rushed down the stairs and was quickly wrapped in Safran’s embrace. From over the Knight’s shoulder, Symvalline said, “Safe. She’s in Arc Rheunos.” She pulled away. “And you all are safe too, yes?” Her eyes caught the eldest of the Knights, who’d also remained quiet, but his thin lips were stretched in a grin. “Griggory?” she said softly. “Are my eyes deceiving me?”
“It’s been some ages, Knight Lutair, and you’re still as fair as the glint of Halla on Lake Cuffdeach in springtime.”
“We’re safe as kórb seeds, we are,” Stave said, looking around. “But I heard Ulfric speakin’. Where’s the old man at, then?”
Symvalline took Roibeard’s hand and squeezed it, then did the same with Stave’s. Mylla had remained a few steps back, wrestling with the guilt she’d been carrying at believing she’d been partly to blame for Symvalline’s and Isemay’s deaths back on Mount Omina. That her friend and mentor had survived, when they’d all accepted that she was dead, hadn’t quite gotten through yet.
“Mylla,” said Symvalline, her voice and the smile she sent Mylla soft and knowing, and telling Mylla the guilt she’d carried was utterly unnecessary. Then the Yorish Knight looked around at everyone and reached for the pendant she wore. Mylla recognized the memory keeper. She’d seen it a couple of times when Ulfric had been carving the stone into a dragørfly shape as a gift for their daughter.
With the pendant now held aloft, they could all see something so fantastical that none of them could quite believe it for a moment. Ulfric’s face in the center crystal, only the size of a thumb, but his face nonetheless.
“Knights, we have much to discuss,” he said gravely.
“The one thing we know with any certainty is that if Balavad were planning to destroy Vinnr, he would have done so by now,” Roi stated. A hint of dawn light began to brighten the sky to their east.
“You don’t think enslaving the whole realm and all its people is akin to destroying it?” Stave asked grumpily. His scowl had turned into a trench in his forehead that a ship could have been lost in as Ulfric and Symvalline had unfolded the harrowing yet captivating tale of defeating Balavad’s plot in Arc Rheunos, and the freeing of the realm’s Verity from a cage like the one that Ulfric and Vaka Aster now shared.
As fantastic and improbable as their story had been, even Ulfric had lost the ability for speech when Mylla had told him she thought she knew the way to unmake the cage. Strangely, after he’d seemed to accept this, he quickly moved the conversation to confronting Balavad rather than freeing Vaka Aster.
“My meaning was clear, Stave,” Roi said. “We are now at an advantage, if you can call anything about this an advantage. With Balavad focused on a war, rather than on revenge for what Vaka Aster did to Battgjald, we may have a chance to retrieve…” His voice trailed away for a brief moment as he gazed at Ulfric’s pendant. As they all were, he was still trying to understand what had become of their leader, his disembodiment and unusual partnership with Urgo. “A chance to retrieve Ulfric. His body anyway.” The first rays of sunlight lit his pale hair and made his topaz eyes glitter. Their brightness contrasted the deep crow’s-feet grooved beside his eyes, lines deeper than his age would suggest, and Mylla remembered that Roi had been a seafarer before he’d been a Knight. The weathering of his features had always made him look just as sober and grave as he behaved. A truth supported by his next statement. “War, if nothing else, makes an unequaled distraction.”
“You’re suggesting we may be able to slip into Dyrrakium and spirit him away,” Safran said.
“Aye. We have two Scrylles and seven Knights now. Nine counting Urgo and Yggo.”
“Nine and half if you count Ulfric, even though he’s taking up a lot less space than he used to,” Jaemus commented distractedly. His gaze was focused on the east, where the outline of a sun began to crest the endless waves of the Never Sea.
Like he’s never seen a sunrise before, Mylla thought, then realized he hadn’t, not in Himmingaze at least. She had to give the man immense credit for how well he seemed to be handling it. It couldn’t have fully sunk in yet that he’d just saved his world from extinction.
In fact, upon Ulfric’s and Symvalline’s explanation of all that was happening, they’d all needed a handful of moments before they’d gotten their bearings back. In that time, the Himmingazian ship returned, having moved from the island when the comet first struck to assess any danger. The ship now floated in waters so strangely placid that it almost seemed they hadn’t saved Himmingaze so much as had been transported somewhere completely new. Jaemus had gone to check on the Himmingazians, and finding his friends unharmed, he then joined them in their conversation. Mylla supposed a person could get used to an awful lot rather quickly if not just their life but their world, and many others, depended on it.
“It is true, it is,” Stave said. “Our numbers are strong, stronger than most armies.”
“Let’s not get carried away in assessing our own strength,” Roi said, adding, “But we’ll be stronger yet if we can purge Eisa of Balavad’s influence.”
Eisa… Mylla shivered again at the description Ulfric gave them of what had become of her. Yet, she felt oddly detached about the Knight and her fate. Neither sympathy nor compassion had found their way into her heart for the woman. Until today, she’d thought Eisa had betrayed them all, and it was she who had sent Lock into the war-torn, Ravener-infested city of Asteryss to retrieve the final Fenestros without a shred of care whether he lived or died. Yet in the end, Eisa had saved the Knights, and had even saved Mylla, if Ulfric’s full story was to believed, at the expense of her own freedom and probably her life. Mylla didn’t know how to feel about Eisa, besides conflicted.
She noted how Symvalline looked at Roi with pity as she said, “Eisa will need to be dealt with. And now she’ll be more than she was. She’ll be a force.”
“Dealt with
” didn’t ring the same note as what Mylla would have expected her to say. “Saved” seemed more in line with the plans she’d imagine they’d want to start drawing.
Ulfric jumped in. “Because, despite knowing how to unmake the cage thanks to Mylla, we can’t go back to Vinnr with only that plan in mind. We have to do more than free Vaka Aster. We have to aim our sights on stopping Balavad. Permanently.”
This got everyone to focus sharply on him. After a few weighty moments, Stave said, “Stop, you say. Stop Balavad. A Verity with the power of the Cosmos at his fingertips.” He glanced around at the others. “This sounds like the kind of war even the Knights couldn’t win. I’d ask if you’ve been hit in the head one too many times, Ulfric, except that you no longer have one.”
“Ulfric’s right,” Symvalline said. “Balavad will be more driven than ever to get his revenge, especially if we did somehow manage to free Vaka Aster first.”
“Well, then, at that point, won’t Vaka Aster simply give him the boot if he starts stirring up trouble in Vinnr?” asked Jaemus. He looked at Griggory. “And what about Himmingaze? Will the Creatress protect us from him?”
It was Ulfric who answered. “As we’ve learned from the Arc Rheunosians, there is more than one way for a Verity with ill intent to poison a world. Balavad’s Raveners assaulted Ivoryss in an out-and-out attack. But before that, he brought Yor under his thumb through quiet deceit. And who knows how long he worked his subtlety? Yet Vaka Aster never even stirred from her ages-long repose. Another thing we know with certainty is that despite the Verities’ great powers, they also have great weaknesses, chief among them the inability to see each other from afar. Vinnr is our world, as much as our maker’s. Maybe more, as we have the most to lose if it’s taken from us. And it’s the same for you here now, Jaemus.”
“And therefore, it is up to us to save it, as Jaemus did Himmingaze, as you did Arc Rheunos,” Safran said.
