by C. L. Murray
He reclined underneath the trees, and the lions keeping to his trail bedded down in a semicircle behind, where they seemed content to remain all through the night. Surrounded by his willing protectors, he lay in complete relaxation, and despite the horrors that had transpired that day, he could not help but feel happy, happier than he recalled ever having been in his sixteen years. He did not even remember that the Goldshard, which he had coveted for so long, sat in the pocket over his beating heart.
He let all worries melt away, and sleep swept over him while the apples twinkled above, uncharted constellations within the forest. He needed no bed, no pillow, no fire; the Isle’s soil was soft, and its shelter warm.
Morlen’s eyelids were slowly pried open by sunlight, and he awoke like he’d slept for years until this day. He could tell the lions were still close, feeling the air buzz with their focused interest in him. But, there was something else, someone else, a presence charged with loneliness built up over years of unbroken solitude, though it exuded great power as well. He gingerly rolled to his other side, and saw that a man stood a few paces off with his back turned, facing the river.
“I envy you,” the stranger said. “Tasting the Isle’s divine fruit, feeling its unequaled comfort for the very first time. I myself was born here, and I took this place for granted until I left its shelter, long ago. When I came back, I was as you are now—alone, afraid of the world outside, immersing myself in the Isle’s pleasures and vowing never to leave again.”
Then, the man turned around and looked down at him. At his side shone the steel grip of a large sword sheathed under his brown cloak. He folded both thick arms across his chest, which puffed out beneath light furs stitched together. His face and long hair were rugged, but his eyes were cool and relaxed.
Morlen regarded him almost as an apparition brought on by the Isle. “You’re one of the people the stories are about,” he marveled.
A grin opened up through the man’s dark beard, further diminishing his wild look. “Before your entrance I was the only one left, and had been for quite some time. But now, I am glad to say that we are two.”
“Glad?” Morlen laughed skeptically, propping up on his elbows. “Hardly anyone has ever cared where I go, as long as it’s away from them.”
“Those horsemen cared very much. So did the shriekers. Yet, though they were at your heels you eluded them on foot. Is that something you dismiss as an ordinary feat? Something any man could have survived?”
“I was afraid,” said Morlen, “desperate, really. I didn’t have time to understand it. Anyone being threatened like that would have run just as hard.”
“Just like anyone with a mind to enter the Forbidden Isle could do so at will?” the man retorted. “Those fellows looked determined to follow you to the ends of the earth. But you are here, Morlen, and they are not.”
Taken aback, Morlen sat up with arms around his knees. “How do you know—?”
“What I know matters little. And what the people of Korindelf knew is far less. You place such great value on what others think of you. But what do you know, Morlen? Who are you?”
Morlen stared at him in bewilderment. “I…” He fell silent, grasping at nothing.
“You do not know?” the man asked glumly.
“Who are you, then?” Morlen said in frustration. “Is it easy for you to understand?”
“It is never easy. For me, there are moments when, like you, I am at a loss. But at this moment, I know with complete certainty. I am Matufinn of the Blessed Ones.”
Morlen raised his brows at the answer. Straightening stiffly while remaining seated, he said, “The Blessed Ones are dead.”
“Yet look at us, the two remaining sons of Morthadus, in good health,” said Matufinn. “Separated by a world that would see his line extinguished, now together in the place where it began.”
“I’ve never heard of him before,” Morlen cut in.
“You have,” Matufinn answered, “though not by name. He led the lions into the Battle of Korindelf centuries ago, against those that cast down the rest of his order. That strength endures in his blood, strength that has undoubtedly manifested itself in you, though you refuse to acknowledge it. But soon enough, you will.” He bent forward, stretching out his arm.
Though utterly unsure what to make of the man’s claims, Morlen felt no reason to fear him, and saw danger now as something foreign while taking his extended hand. And Matufinn effortlessly lifted him to stand, his grip lingering slightly longer than necessary as though to savor the first human contact he’d had in many years. Then he abruptly let go and turned to walk beside the river.
Morlen followed, silently in awe as Matufinn appeared something more than human. His mind ached trying to comprehend this paradise that had for centuries stood uncorrupted by the world. “What is this place?” he asked. “How could it have stayed so pure for all this time?”
Matufinn replied, “When Morthadus escaped the massacre that ensnared his brothers, Korine the Ancient gave him this realm, so that the Blessed Ones would always live on within its borders. The river that flows from beneath the high mountain, the fruits that never wither—these are gifts to only us, to be touched by no other, except those we invite inside. And the children of Morthadus have kept it for him ever since he departed, some looking to his return.”
“You’re saying this… Morthadus… is immortal?” asked Morlen.
“Yes,” said Matufinn. “The original One Hundred all were. The Blessed Ones, chosen for their bravery, endowed with the powers to protect Korine’s city through the ages. But after they fell, massacred by the shriekers, their tradition lived on in Morthadus, and it is said that as his sons grew old and died, he remained young. We have carried on his legacy ever since, fighting for Korindelf as he did.”
“Then, if this is true,” Morlen replied, clearly having difficulty accepting it, “you’re telling me that makes us… brothers?”
Matufinn chuckled at the question. “What it makes us is ours to find, in time. What remains to be found is in you, and always has been. You must decide whether or not you are ready to face it.”
They traveled for miles through woods that receded to reveal wild grasslands, down green hills and quiet glens that opened into valleys of violet and jade. When Morlen passed under more enticing apples, he eagerly gathered two, relishing them both. Matufinn, however, hardly even glanced at the overhanging bounty.
“The apples,” Morlen sputtered through a mouthful. “I’ve never had anything that made me feel so… free. Why are you not eating them?”
Matufinn smiled. “The apples are beyond your world, but they have always been an ordinary part of my own, from the moment I left my mother’s womb and opened new eyes to see them around me. It is through knowing the vastness outside of what we’ve known that we find real freedom.”
Morlen cautiously pressed, uncertain whether he should question Matufinn’s decision to live here in seclusion. “And did you find that, when you left this place?”
Holding quiet at first, the man led Morlen to think he’d struck a nerve. Before long he replied, “I found a great many things when I left, when I was not much older than you are now. Death and suffering, more than anything else. I lost… people, out there… one in battle, and the other later, in Korindelf.”
“You did battle with the shriekers?” Morlen asked intently.
“Oh yes,” said Matufinn. “Along with the only other of my kind who dwelt here, years ago. We charged into the fray with Korindelf’s army—men who served long before those treacherous fools currently in power, mind you. We moved like water and wind,” he boasted, drawing his sword to swiftly cut two apples from a nearby branch, slicing them both cleanly in half with a single stroke before they hit the ground. “We shattered scores of foes by the minute, letting none land a single blow.
“Until”—Matufinn’s voice became grave—“the two of us were separated. And I, engrossed in the task of keeping them off of me, saw that they had
overpowered him… biting, ripping, pulling him deeper into their fold where even the strongest bones are crushed, and thickest skin devoured.
“I drove them back in rage,” he continued, “lifting one after another as shields against the rest, hoping that as they withdrew, they would leave something of him to recover. But they leave nothing of what they take.”
Matufinn stopped from time to time as though basking in the atmosphere, guided by every energy that Morlen was only beginning to feel, near and far. Such an odd mannerism led Morlen to suspect that if Matufinn had ventured to Korindelf during his upbringing, perhaps his own uncommon features would have met more acceptance than distaste.
“When you first went to Korindelf,” said Morlen, “did you feel—”
“Overwhelmed?” finished Matufinn, laughing under his breath. “Dazed by the thousands who knew not whether to fear or accept me?
“Like you would drown under the way they looked at you every day?”
“Ha!” Matufinn laughed aloud this time. “I had a special spot picked out to escape them, where I’d often go just to remember which feelings were my own.”
“Till it became more difficult each time.”
“Much more. That is, until I let in someone different than the rest, someone who wanted nothing from me except what I wished to freely give.”
Morlen’s interest rose, this time unable to share from his own experience. “What was it you gave this person?”
Matufinn’s steps scuffed more against the ground as his expression became nostalgic. “Everything,” he answered.
“And they took it from you? And left you worse off?”
“She? No. She made me better for it, far better. But, when she died, a great deal left me as well.”
Beginning to uncover how deep Matufinn’s wound was, and how it had kept him here unhealed for so long, Morlen realized they were equally alone. “And you’ve been here ever since? With no desire to venture out again?”
Matufinn’s expression remained pleasant, though it seemed to require too much effort. “The desire arose at times,” he replied. “Some nights I told myself I would again. But when tomorrow became the day after, and months soon turned to years, I knew the part of me that had so readily left these borders was gone.”
Morlen recalled the countless times he’d wanted to shut himself in rather than struggle to improve his daily life. He could understand someone else’s submission to that fear, when his own resistance had never gained him much. “But what about your people’s tradition?” he asked. “Going out there when oppression is at its worst? I thought you meant to carry on their legacy.”
Matufinn nodded. “That’s where you come in.”
Morlen scoffed, shaking his head. “I’m sure my ability to enter this place can be explained,” he began. “But I doubt it has any connection to some warrior who’s lived for over nine hundred years. If my father was alive all along, where was he when I spent most days getting beaten into the ground? If I have the same qualities he does, why couldn’t I ever keep myself from harm? If he’s powerful, why am I weak?”
“Maybe he wanted you to have a life different than his own,” said Matufinn. “To be born outside the confines that held him too long. For comfort and shelter to be so scarce that you would develop strengths he never possessed.”
“How can you be so convinced?” Morlen asked. “You said yourself that anyone invited to the Isle can freely pass. I would never have thought to come here if I hadn’t been told.”
“Nottleforf merely suggested the path. You are the one who found it.”
The familiarity in Matufinn’s reference to the wizard confirmed what Morlen had begun to suspect. “You knew him too,” he realized aloud.
Matufinn answered halfheartedly, “Knowing Nottleforf is like knowing the weather. Hope for what it’s going to bring, and be devastated. Or open yourself to the unexpected, and be uplifted. Either way, there’s no telling what’s in store for you.”
At this talk of Nottleforf, Morlen felt a pang of worry. Could he still have had power left to reach safety after helping him escape the shriekers? Or could he be languishing now at Korindelf, held captive by Felkoth in a putrid dungeon? Or worse?
No, he told himself. Nottleforf was strong, cleverer than anyone. Somehow, he felt certain they would meet again. And despite the distance the wizard had made a point of keeping from him in recent years, he was comforted by that thought.
“He never told me anything,” said Morlen. “Nothing about my father. Nothing about what it was that made me seem so out of place to everyone, even though he saw me suffer because of it. He could have just sent me here all along, years before now.”
“So you could be brought up hiding from the world, like the rest of us?” Matufinn asked. “For generations we were born into pleasure and safety, never having to earn it, never having to do without it so long that we could appreciate its value. All the treasures to unearth out there were too far beyond our reach, when all we knew was abundance… permanence.
“But you,” he continued, “unspoiled, gaining nothing without hardship, have been immersed in everything our people feared, conditioned by it as we were not. You could be the best of us. The best of both worlds.”
“What about the woman in Korindelf?” asked Morlen. “Did losing her make you wish you’d never found her in the first place?”
Matufinn turned solemn, and he was silent for a long moment as they walked beside each other. “I begged Nottleforf to save her,” he finally replied. “To keep her as I had known her, not to let her slip away while still in the young bloom of life. He told me we cannot halt death, only be gladdened by the life it leaves behind. So I returned to the life I’d left in here, where the creep of death is slow, and no beauty ever wilts.”
Morlen asked no more after this, thinking it wise to leave the subject alone. He began to notice that the same force pulling him from afar the day before was stronger now, and felt they’d reached its source when the river led to a wide open meadow, flowing into a lake at the opposite end.
“The lake.” Its energy was too bright to fully grasp, as if it were the Isle’s pulsing heart. “There’s something inside it. Something powerful.” Morlen squinted at the surface.
“Yes,” Matufinn replied. “The lake holds a doorway.”
“To what?” asked Morlen.
Matufinn looked out with a slightly furrowed brow. “The lake is fed by the eternal river, but its waters do not flow out,” he said. “Instead, it deepens to where the physical world no longer exists, where space itself can be bent and torn. And rising from within this distorted plane are pockets, like windows through which one can crawl to other locations.”
Morlen’s eyes sharpened with interest at this.
“But,” Matufinn added, “it is only an aid for those who wish to venture outside.”
“You mean,” Morlen pressed, “it can take us anywhere we wish to go, if we ever want to leave?”
Matufinn gave half a smile, led him toward a small boat that sat at the lake’s edge, and pushed it down the pebbled bank until it became adrift in the shallows. “Don’t be concerned with that just yet,” he said, stepping inside the vessel with a gesture for Morlen to follow. “Leave those weapons for the moment. Right now it’s time you see what you have thus far turned away from.”
Morlen hesitated at first, unsure what Matufinn could possibly mean for him to find out in the water. But, reluctantly casting any misgivings aside, he removed his bow and quiver, setting them on the ground. Then he sloshed forward clumsily, and his boots sank through the mud before he wrenched them free with two loud slurps, hoisting himself aboard.
Oars in hand, Matufinn pushed into the smooth, open calm, and Morlen felt like they were floating on liquid light as they rowed farther. Eventually they approached a large rock not far from the opposite shore, its tip protruding from the water like an iceberg, and Matufinn turned the boat to glide against it with a gentle thud.
Noddi
ng toward the rock, he said, “Up you go.”
“For what?” Morlen protested, brows raised suspiciously.
Face hardening, Matufinn said, “An important lesson.”
Morlen stared, arms crossed in skepticism, until Matufinn’s expression turned stern enough to make all hesitation flee. Careful to balance his weight, he rose and stepped out upon the uneven island, wide enough for only one person to stand. Matufinn then swung the boat around and rowed away with great strokes, stopping about twenty yards off to face back again.
“Are you ready to meet what you’ve locked away for so long?” called Matufinn.
Morlen furtively glanced over both shoulders, making sure the question was not posed to someone else. With as much seriousness as he could muster, he nodded.
“Good,” replied Matufinn. “Now run to the boat.”
“Do what?”
“Run to the boat,” Matufinn repeated, with stronger authority this time.
Morlen looked around again in all directions.
“The one in which I sit, Morlen. Run to it, now.”
He let his adjusting vision take in the space between himself and Matufinn’s skiff, feeling absurd for even trying to gauge the distance. Slowly he bent to look down at the water, seeing a helplessly lost boy staring back at him. Aiming for his face, he lifted one foot and stepped out only to fall forward with a pitiful splash.
Half amused, he swam beneath the crystalline water for a few seconds, tempted to summon one of the lake’s distorted pockets to see if it could take him directly to Matufinn’s side. But, thinking such a trick would not be well received, his better judgment took hold.
“Are you ready to learn or not?” Matufinn’s voice bubbled through his ears as he resurfaced. “This time put your heart into the task.”
Aware how foolish he looked climbing up to attempt the feat a second time, Morlen shook the water from his hair and set himself firmly again, fighting to muster a shred of the confidence Matufinn demanded. There was no way that this could be achieved by any man or creature.
