by Awert, Wolf
Dakh-Ozz-Han froze. “And what did you tell him?” he whispered.
“I told him that neither his mother nor I had been able to grant Risang or any of our other sons more than a drop of magic.”
“Continue,” Dakh said.
“And Sedramon said that he knew I was his father, but my wife was not his mother. It took me by surprise. It wasn’t the words he said, but the way he said them. As if that tiny detail explained everything. I sowed my seed among many a fertile woman and never kept it quiet. I made sure they were cared for. But Sedramon had always been something special to me, and I always let him know it. And now he was standing before me and we said nothing to each other until he finally asked me, ‘Father, I know you, but who is my mother?’”
“And did you tell him?”
“Not at first. I didn’t want to. I never told anyone, not even you, Dakh. It’s nobody’s bloody business. I tried to talk about myself, told him how I came to own this piece of land, how I turned Quarrysand and the swampy mess around it into an arable, respectable bit of country. I implied I had a secret to keep of my own, and that I wasn’t the man everyone thought I was. But he cared not for my mysteries save for one – his mother. He asked and asked and asked, and in the end, I gave in.”
“I think, Hermanis, it is time you told an old friend a little of your favored bastard’s parentage. Worry has brought me here, not curiosity. Your son has a decisive part to play in this mad dance of magic. Everything points towards him. But which role this is, I do not know. I must find him, but that is easier said than done; either he has given up on practicing magic and thus obscured himself to any magical eye, or he has the gift of hiding better than a mouse in the desert, invisible to both Ringwall and myself. I don’t know which I like less, Hermanis.”
“You know I was never a sorcerer or even a noble myself, Dakh. And even if you didn’t know, then now you do. I was never part of Ringwall, never part of the higher-ups – they turned their noses up at me, arrogant scum. My father was a druid, my mother a timerider. So it all began with a druid breaking the rules and taking the wrong woman. The druids would still have acknowledged me as one of their own, but I didn’t think like them, I didn’t feel like them, and I never wanted to be like them. My secret is this: I never went to Ringwall. Father taught me the powers of magic and all about the energy of the five elements, and Mother showed me how to pass through the flow of time. Unfortunately I never inherited her powers to look through the window of time. I can move freely between past, present and future, but I am half-blind, half-deaf, and mute as only a dead man can be. But who knows what can happen when different magics begin to mingle. And so it’s probably no great surprise to learn that I got to know a shamaness.”
“Yes, the druid in you is clear enough to me, Hermanis,” Dakh said, “and I often wondered, in years past, why you never felt at home in our magic. But now I understand. The magical patterns I have learned to interpret are the images of the here and now, and from them I gather what might happen tomorrow or the day after, or even next winter. But I never dared look too far into the future. Druidism and time-riding are incompatible with each other. Oh, my friend, what a burden you have been given to carry…”
Dakh-Ozz-Han laid an arm around Hermanis’ shoulder and squeezed him tightly. “Be one or the other, my friend, but don’t tear yourself in two trying to be both. And now tell me about this shamaness of yours.”
“Half-shamaness, really. But what is there to tell? She wandered around, never staying at one spot too long, always around the outskirts of the swamp. It was only a matter of time before we met. She still lives around here somewhere. Shouldn’t be too hard to find her, if she wants to be found, that is. Urna, that was her name. I could tell you it was her womanly charm that won me over, but that would be a lie. She attracted men, true enough, but her charm was the least of her gifts. Her eyes burned you and her mouth devoured you. When you were with her you never really knew where you were. I think we spent more time together in the Other World than here. She wasn’t one of my usual adventures.”
Hermanis stopped surprised at the weight of the memories his words conjured up. It took a while before he had steadied himself enough to continue talking about his affair. When he did, there was a smile on his lips.
“Perhaps she was an adventure, Dakh. But if so, then certainly not a short one, and most definitely not the kind others might suspect. Every time I met with her was an adventure, and I did not need to cross the lands of Pentamuria to seek that fine line between life and death. Urna took me with her into the Other World. She was a shamaness, the daughter of a shamaness and her father was a black warlock, she told me. Believe you me, the five elements are almost childish compared to the things possible in the Other World, particularly if you know a thing or two about the ancient magic.”
Dakh’s grip on Hermanis’ arm tightened. “Are you saying there was a magic before the five elements? Impossible. There is only one magic.”
“I can imagine that the druids and the mages of Ringwall don’t like to talk about it. But you druids ought to know better. You know the magic of the Oas.”
Dakh shook his head. “The Oas have…” he begun, only to fall silent again. Had it not been Nill, his friend and problem child, who had tried to tell him something about an ancient magic?
“If you want to know more, ask a black warlock. But black warlocks never grow old. Their magic is too much for their bodies, it burns them sheer up. Or ask a witchdaughter. But they don’t like talking. They know why. Go and find Urna. If she wants you to find her, it’ll be easy. I doubt she’d want to see me again.”
“Was there that much bad blood between you when you separated?” Dakh assumed the worst.
“Bad blood, hrm. There were… decisions to be made. Painful, yes, but for a man in my position, the obvious and only choice. I had my estate, my wife and my sons, my responsibilities here; on the other side I had a wild life of freedom, flitting between this and the Other World. Never certain of whether I was living now or in the past.”
“And you chose security.”
“Not security, old friend. Responsibility.”
“And you told Sedramon all this?”
Hermanis hunched over, his head dropping below his shoulders. “Not all of it…” He stopped. “I’m not a diplomat. At heart, I’m a warrior. What could I have done? Yes, I told Sedramon. I was disappointed. If he wanted to leave Quarrysand behind, then so be it. I wouldn’t stop him. He was his own man. I told him to find his mother. Perhaps she had better answers for him than I. I was honest with him, and I have no regrets.”
“Your mind is reading the words to you, but your heart says something quite different, isn’t it so, Hermanis? What is it that gnaws at your insides, enough to make you go red when you speak of it. What troubles you so? Tell me, Hermanis, that I may tell Sedramon if I ever find him.”
Hermanis threw his arms up in the air as if to summon a legion of air-spirits. Quietly, he said: “When Sedramon left, I called after him to tell his mother than I still think of her, even though she probably doesn’t care. But I never accompanied him to the door, I never gave him the last hug I wish I had. I never gave him my fatherly blessing as honor and tradition would have me do. And now I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know whether he’s still my son.”
*
Sedramon had taken flight from his father’s house in wild haste. There were not many places in Quarrysand where his mother might have lived, and he knew them all. He hurried through the villages around the family estate – often, these were no more than eight or nine huts standing close enough to each other to be counted a village – and asked here and there about an old shamaness, and the mucklings gave answers willingly. Many of them knew him from his childhood, and the younger people, those who had not at some point been a victim to one of his pranks, could not fail to see that Sedramon was visibly noble and gifted in the magical arts.
He finally found his mother in a crag, the sort t
hat used to incite a sense of reckless adventure in him as a child. The entrance was small, and he felt absurdly compelled to suck in his gut to fit through, although he had never reached his father’s size. It widened into a proper cave after a few steps, room enough for two or three people. There was even a smoke-hole in the ceiling; nature had serendipitously decided to let a crack run all the way through the rock there.
“Mother, I am your son,” Sedramon spoke into the half-dark. He could not see anyone, but he felt keenly the presence of a strong aura.
“Come in, and let me get a better look at you, my boy. Tell me your name.”
Sedramon felt a stab of sadness go through his heart. His mother had forgotten his name. He gazed into the shadows, fearing the moment the light came and he would behold an old woman who was no longer entirely of this world.
“Sedramon-Per, Mother. My name is Sedramon-Per.”
“Oh? You think so? Sedramon-Per? Oh well, you’ll find your name soon enough. I don’t know your face. It’s changed, but your aura hasn’t. A flickering like that isn’t likely to be born twice in Pentamuria.”
The voice in the darkness sounded firm, strong and warm, not at all the crazed croak he had expected from an old shamaness.
Sedramon-Per took a few steps forward and made an illumination. “I bring greetings from Hermanis-Per, my father,” he said with all the dignity he could muster.
“Oh, greetings from the old fool, how nice. He is a fool, your father,” the shamaness replied. “He had the magic and restlessness of his father, and the ability to ride through time from his mother, and what does he do? Gets himself made part of the gentry with a huge piece of land to nail him down. He never knew where he belonged. And he’s twice the fool for sending you to Ringwall. I asked him what he meant of it, and he said he knew what he was doing.” She spat to the side. “You have the elements in your blood, son; you are quarter-druid, and the magic of the Other World came to you through me and my mother before me, your other grandmother gave you intimacy with time, and my father passed down his connection to the ancient magic. And with all these gifts your idiot father decided to send you to Ringwall. Ringwall, of all places! Remember this, my son: most mages have never understood more about their magic than a worm knows about the apple he’s living in. The worm thinks the apple’s the whole world, and the mages think they’re the lords over all the apples.” She spat again. “They’re not even the lords over the worms. An apple hangs on a tree, and that tree comes from the earth, and its roots are deep in the soil and rocks and its head in the clouds and the rain. All that is beyond their pathetic little world.”
The shamaness’ voice dripped with contempt that had been nurtured for generations. And yet the hint of a laugh kept squeezing itself between her bitter words. “And about your name, my boy, you have many. But Sedramon-Per is not one of them.”
Sedramon crossed his long arms and legs and sat down opposite his mother. He saw he first as just a jumble of clothes, from which a wild mess of jet-black hair protruded. It was quite unlike his own blond hair. This is supposed to be my mother? he thought, doubt etched in his every sense.
“But you always knew where you belonged, is that it?” Sedramon’s voice was cool and he hoped the authority he laid into his doubt made it sound stronger than he felt. He did not intend to grant his mother insight into the storm of emotion that currently raged inside him as he tried to recognize anything in that jumble of clothes that was in any way connected to him.
The laugh in his mother’s voice grew more pronounced.
“I don’t belong anywhere, child. Shamans are like druids. They wander around, never knowing exactly where they are. Worse than that, even; sometimes, we don’t even know when we are.”
Her laughter reverberated around the steeply sloping walls of the crag, up and down, and Sedramon was surprised to note that it was truly a young woman’s laugh: joyous, challenging, almost impertinent.
“But you, my son, you have such strong roots in the here… you’re not made for wandering around. You’ll find the place you’re looking for some day, and spend the rest of your days wherever Pentamuria’s future lies. And let me tell you, the place you’re going isn’t called Quarrysand.”
She erupted again in a fit of laughter. It took quite some time for her to calm down again. Sedramon repeated her words quietly, searching them for the cause of her mirth. He could not find it.
“You’re the only person I believe could master some magic, rather than pretending like one of those arrogant mages that magical ability makes a master. The master controls and understands magic, becomes part of it until he no longer needs any of it; his world, his life, is nothing else now. To this day,” she smiled, “there has never been a true master of magic. They’ve all vanished into the past, no more than a faint memory. Should you want to meet them, you would have to call them, or find them in the Other World.”
The shamaness had calmed down enough to only be emitting the occasional chuckle.
“But how do you become part of magic?” Sedramon asked. “How would I go about it? I’m not even a real sorcerer. My magical powers do whatever they want with me, not the other way around.” Sedramon was despairing, his formality had long since departed.
“It’s not easy combining as many gifts as you have. You reach mastery by practicing. Use magic wherever you are, whenever you can. Always practice.”
Sedramon gave a short, bitter laugh. “No human has that kind of power. I’d exhaust myself before sundown, and then you’d be one son down.”
“You fool. Who taught you magic, hm? Probably someone with less understanding of it than yourself. Mages, pah! Who says your spells need to be powerful? Who says you need to spend loads of energy on them? What’s important is that you do it all the time, with every gesture, every word; don’t stay stuck on a favorite spell, use all the magical streams equally, go over into the Other World and experiment with different laws: it’s all part of the same magic! I’d also recommend using as much of the ancient magic as possible, but sorcerers these days hardly know it even exists. I don’t know much of it, and your grandfather is no longer with us. He showed it to me, but never deigned to teach. ‘You need to be of the here to know the ancient magic,’ he used to say. ‘You’re too powerless, it would burn you,’ he said. But you’re different. Go and find the ancient magic.
“All the magical arts are surrounded by mysteries. The ancients knew it. It disappeared with them and was lost with the Books of Prophecy. If you rediscover this mystery, understand it and follow it in life, you’ll reach the peak of magic.”
“As is every arcanist’s dream,” Sedramon interjected. “The White mages of Ringwall have been hunting it for centuries.”
“Even more fools. They’ll never discover the mystery. They’re looking in the wrong place.”
“You know it? You know the way?”
She shook her head. After a pause she said: “Come, let me show you what I mean. Hold out your hand.”
Sedramon cautiously obeyed and felt the warm, soft skin of his mother’s hand, which suddenly gave way to an iron vice around his wrist. Before he could say or ask anything, it all went black.
“Where are we?” he asked once he had regained consciousness.
“Look down.”
He noted with surprise that he had his eyes firmly shut. He opened his eyes and saw that he was flying, hand in hand with his mother, across an endless plain. No trees, no bushes broke up the monotonous landscape; only brown, dead earth, gray and black shadows flitting across it.
“All I see are fleeting shades.”
“We’re above the Plain of the Dead. It’s the easiest to reach from our world, because it’s very similar to what we know in the here. Wait a moment.”
The images before his eyes became distorted and warped. The shadows disappeared and returned. But now, Sedramon saw, there were black lumps between dark red spots.
“And this? What is this?”
“Can’t you see?”
his mother asked. “We’re flying over a forest.”
“A forest?” His mother was mad. “It’s all black and red and dead. Those aren’t plants, those are rocks and hardship and suffering. What sort of forest is this supposed to be?”
“You’re right, it’s a stone forest. Still, it can be alive. There is no Wood energy in the Other World. You’ll find no green grass or blue blossoms here. That’s all I know, though; I have no idea where we are.”
Sedramon’s stomach lurched uncomfortably. “Are you telling me we’ve lost our way?”
“I don’t know where we are because the laws of space and time we know in our world have no say in matters over here. Our bodies are still safe and sound in the crag where you found me. Your body knows no better and is using your memories to bring you back. In order to take your real body with you, you need long years of practice and experience, because your body can’t enter all the places in the Other World that your spirit can. But it’s an art worth learning. Shamans were always hunted and persecuted, all across the lands. And some who ran and were cornered had no other choice but to leap into the beyond. Not all of them came back. Enough talk. Fly alone, now.”
At these words she relinquished her grip on his wrist and Sedramon lost all sense of direction. Space and time had ceased to exist, and in their place was an omnipresent, muted gray. The stone forest had vanished, the silence hacked at his nerves. He could not see his mother. Sedramon fought against the fear that was rising in his gut like vomit and forced himself to breathe slowly. Without his mother’s guiding strength he seemed to fly much slower. Sedramon decided to land, although he was not entirely certain how to arrange it. But the wish alone seemed enough. His body straightened, the dull gray began to take shape and form contours, and the forest returned. At first it was only spots of red color, but then he saw great strong trees with wide trunks and wider crowns. Where had the Wood energy come from so suddenly? There was a clearing with tall grass, colorful flowers dotting the ground here and there. The leaves stroked his face, but he did not feel them. Branches passed through him as though he was made of water. Sedramon wanted to reach the ground and wondered whether he’d simply sink through the earth, whether he could stand. His flight slowed to a crawl, stuttered—
