by T. A. Miles
I hurried into the deeper darkness of the main room and felt my way around what little furniture we owned toward the front door. I was still dressed and had my shoes on, so it didn’t bother me all that much to step out into the crisp air. Moonlight enabled me to see. It was no trouble to spot up Erschal, still lying in the grass where Father had dropped him. He looked like he was sleeping, like maybe he was too cold and hungry to leave. I wondered why he never tried scratching at the door or barking. He didn’t even whine a little, like pups do.
“Erschal,” I said quietly, crouching down beside the small dog. “You sleepin’? Want somethin’ to eat?”
I stroked his soft coat once, noticing how he didn’t move much. He may not have moved at all. I picked him up anyway, thinking he was just tired and hungry. I headed for the barn, where I planned to warm the pup up. Later, I would sneak into the kitchen and pull out some scraps for him. Brea could see him in the morning. That would make her happy and when Father was feeling better, he would warm to the idea of keeping the pup.
I mentioned that to Erschal as I walked. I was halfway across the yard when I realized that the pup wasn’t sleeping. He also wasn’t breathing. His blue eyes were open, seeing nothing, because he was dead.
I don’t know why I didn’t drop him. I felt like I wanted to, but I kept holding the body instead, staring at the strange way the neck was bent, wondering if there was anything that could be done. Brea was going to be so unhappy. How did it happen anyway? Father must have dropped him too hard or just wrong. Not on purpose, though. My father would never—
A scream shattered the cold silence outside. It had come from inside … from my mother.
Finally, I dropped the dead pup, and I was running back to the house. Panic flared in my chest. It made my lungs hurt, as if I’d run eight times the distance to the house already. It felt even worse when I heard Brea crying. She sounded scared, like when she’d had a bad dream, but I wasn’t there to console her. I didn’t know why I felt like I needed to be there to protect her.
There wasn’t any reason to be afraid. Something must have gotten into the house … a rat or a bat or something, and scared Mother. She had always startled easily. I hoped I could get back into the house before Father went to check on my sister.
When I got to the door, I could hear my brother as well. It was Ervanien. Mother and Schalek were both quiet. Brea stopped crying shortly after I entered the house. Ervanien was sobbing as if he were half his age again, whimpering incoherently. I thought I heard him say, “I love you, Da’. I’m sorry.” Like he wanted to avoid punishment, but what for? Father never dealt to them harshly for their mistakes and misbehavior anyway. There was no reason for Ervanien to be so scared.
But he was scared. And when I arrived back in our bedroom, I knew why. It paralyzed me, what I saw. I could not have described what I felt just at that moment. I stood utterly frozen and stared at the bodies of my sister and my brother, mutilated as if by an animal. I didn’t notice when Ervanien fell quiet; it might have happened just as I was entering the room. I saw him last, crumpled in the corner … dead. I imagined my mother looked the same way.
My father was still alive. He turned to look at me from the corner where he had just murdered his youngest son. His eyes gleamed wrongly in the wan light coming through the window. I felt as if I wasn’t seeing my father at all, but something else altogether. Something so vile and so terrifying that I couldn’t accept it. It was easier for me to acknowledge the deaths of my siblings. They had been murdered … and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t help them at all. Little Brea … Schalek … and poor Ervanien….
I was crying where I stood, unable to do anything else, even as my father came for me. It wasn’t until the very last moment, that instinct jolted me. I spun about and tried to run away, but my father had me. He took both my arms and pulled me back. I writhed and twisted, but his grip was too strong. I couldn’t break free.
I heard something like a hissing or a growling sound before I felt a stabbing pain over my shoulder. It ran down my back and my right arm, throbbing and burning. I couldn’t hear myself screaming as my blood pounded in my ears, but I knew that I was. And I knew also that I was going to die, just like my brothers and sister.
Light burst suddenly into the room, as if a storm had reached into it. I could feel the heat, but there was no thunder with this lightning. The only crash was my body falling to the floor beneath my father’s. My father was limp suddenly and when I turned over I thought I recognized his face again, but in the next instant his features contorted with pain and shock as something leaped onto him from out of the darkness. It killed him before I could react, but not before someone shouted at me to get down.
I pressed myself against the floor and covered my head. I heard quick footsteps, the singing hiss of metal, and the final brief sound of something swiftly dying. I didn’t know what it was or who had killed it. I thought the man might kill me also. I told him I was ready to die while he knelt beside me and unsheathed another weapon, or maybe the same one he’d just used.
He pressed his hand onto my shoulder, as if to keep me positioned face down on the floor. “You’re not going to die,” the man said, “but this will hurt. I’m sorry.”
I felt a blade upon my back, where my father had wounded me. I was sure somehow that he’d bitten me. I decided not to let that thought linger and felt the stranger’s knife twice over as he drew it across my shoulder blade. I clamped my jaw and tried not to cry out, though it hurt terribly. Before it got worse, I blacked out.
And with that statement made in memory, the shapeless blackness of the spell-induced dreaming returned.
Ashwin opened his eyes, awakened from one of the more tranquil rests he’d had in recent years. The silhouette of Korsten’s shoulder was in his view in the half-dark. The lack of light muted the vivid color of his student’s hair as it lay over his skin in undecided ringlets, which draped toward the minor space between them. They had been here before, but not like this. This was the most emotionally and spiritually fulfilled Ashwin had been in too many years to recall, if he had ever been so. And now the task, after years spent trying to obtain, lay in keeping.
That worry was not for now. Unfortunately, Ashwin had others worries that had drawn him from slumber and stolen him out of the peace he had found that night. Their love had always been peaceful, even before this new level of contact, but what surrounded it was not. What swirled around Korsten’s subconscious was not.
By now, Ashwin would have thought their spell touch dimmed to near nothing, but it persisted, like the spirits haunting Korsten’s mind and soul, except that the lingering of their connection was to the Mage-Adept’s benefit. It enabled Ashwin to know about the emotional wraiths his student had been carrying.
Those wraiths manifested with laughter that sounded female in intonation, though it was greatly distorted by the malevolent nature of the memory. Ashwin listened, observing the darkness, from which a slick arm rose and draped itself over Korsten’s legs. The shoulder and head of a woman with damp hair hanging followed. She grinned with a malformed mouth, looking directly at Ashwin while Korsten remained asleep, dreaming in some way of the very thing Ashwin was now witness to.
He propped himself on his elbow and put a Lantern over the dream wraith—Caras, no doubt. She continued to emit a low, satisfied chuckling sound, though her dark eyes, shot with a sickly warm color, watched the light fall over her wrong human form warily. From that form fibrous tendrils of a bloody red tone were connected, draping from the ceiling. Ashwin’s Lantern rose along the fleshy ropes and in spirit, he rose with it. Both he and the Lantern cast a glow onto many misshapen forms stretched and writhing across the room’s high ceiling. They recoiled with the light, their collective mass shifting wetly toward the far shadowed corners to escape the painful glow. Ashwin tracked the movement of some of them deliberately, looking into the grotesque faces of several of th
e creatures. They pushed into and against one another with overlong limbs in an attempt to move away from his presence.
Ashwin’s perception returned to the bed and he raised a hand. A rotational sweep of his wrist and spread of his fingers sent a wave of white fire up to the ceiling. Flame rolled across the high rafters, outward to all sides of the room, banishing the dream wraiths in a storm of light and the squealing protests of its victims. The fire cleansed the shadows and also travelled down the draping flesh that led to Caras, who let go a wrenching wail and was swallowed into flames which then swallowed themselves. The room, for now, was clear of Korsten’s nightmares.
There were demons crawling the walls of the Seminary in Korsten’s dream. Scores of them were clawing their way up as they had done in his vision in the streets of Indhovan. He watched them, and in a similar manner to the dream he had had at Irslan’s he was watching someone fall. His feelings were not decipherable in this version of the dream.
Whomever it was vanished from his perception when a hand took hold of his wrist, lurching up from a sea of Vadryn with desperation that nearly pulled him down to them.
The action in dream rested Korsten into reality, so suddenly that he half rolled, half threw himself to the side of the mattress. He hovered there, eyes adjusting to the gray darkness of early morning, searching for someone or something in the room, but he found no one.
He sat up slowly, pushing a hand through his hair, still studying the large open space between the raised floor where the bed sat to the rest of the room. The gloom insisted that no one else was present away from the bed. As consciousness brought him more alert, the bed presented him with white robes strewn over the bedding and half onto the floor, and a body lying close beside him.
“Ashwin,” Korsten whispered, looking the lean frame beneath the sheets over. A form still lean, but broader in some aspects and with darker hair imposed itself over the present image of his mentor. And the next name from Korsten’s lips fell, tearing him inside with its exit. “Merran.”
Korsten all but threw himself from the bed, grabbing up his robe and covering himself as hastily as if he were escaping a fire. He rushed to the door barefoot, tears in his eyes as he opened it only enough to fit through. The instant he could access the hall, he went and disregarded closing the door. He walked quickly down the passage to where it joined with another and proceeded without care or thought save one. He was blind to anyone else who might have been in the corridor and oblivious to the distance or the route, traveling as if by the pull that would lead to a subconscious Reach, though his hands made no spell gesture and it was entirely by foot that he arrived at the door to Merran’s room.
It was open already. He stepped inside, unsure what to expect; Merran awake to glare knowingly at him perhaps. That thought came secondarily to what he only then realized was actually on his mind. His dread in the moments since being pulled from dreaming was that Merran would somehow be gone—Korsten didn’t know by what means—and that Korsten would literally be without him, as if the prior night’s actions had forfeited Merran from his life. But he had made no such choice, and Merran….
Merran yet lay asleep in his bed.
Korsten stopped between the entrance and the bed, bringing a hand to his head to steady its present maelstrom of panic and emotional disorientation. He noticed the others present in the room in the process, but couldn’t be embarrassed or alarmed. It was Ceth and Eisleth. He recognized them. That was as far as the processes of his mind would take him in the moment.
“Is everything all right, Korsten?” Ceth asked him. The elder hesitated, perhaps alarmed by the state of the Adept suddenly in their presence.
Korsten nodded, though it sent his head for a mild spin, now that the near run and the panic that had inspired it were convening in the same place. “I’m … all right.” He closed his eyes for a moment, forced himself to steady inside, then looked at both Superiors and said again. “I’m all right. How is Merran?”
“Despite that you seem to have had Foresight manifest and show you otherwise, he’s quite well,” Ceth said, still observing Korsten with some concern. “As well as he has been since arriving with his injury, that is.”
“I’m glad,” Korsten said, and meant it dearly. He looked to Merran and swallowed a breath in an attempt to make the rest of them better paced. It didn’t work very well, so he tried drawing a deep breath instead. He felt Eisleth’s eyes on him throughout.
“Did you?” Eisleth eventually asked.
Korsten looked at him quickly. “Did I what?”
If Eisleth could not have been suspicious before, he was now. If suspicion was even necessary for Eisleth; Korsten felt that a brief visual assessment was all the Superior required to know the state of another and the cause behind it. Still, the elder did not reveal what he might have known. “Did you have Foresight manifest?” he specified.
“No,” Korsten said at once. And then he shook his head and better explained himself. “I had a startling dream. I awoke with fear for Merran, so I came here.”
Ceth seemed to accept the explanation with a nod while Eisleth continued to observe Korsten, perhaps debating levels of guilt and what bearing or importance that guilt might have had in the moment.
While Korsten felt that he might begin to dwindle spiritually beneath the gaze of one elder, the other moved toward Merran’s bed. Korsten welcomed Ceth’s words when they came, both for the sake of distraction from Eisleth and of knowing what might have been transpiring where Merran’s condition was concerned. He could not spend the next year or several asleep.
“We’ve come to a conclusion concerning Merran’s injury, and what can be done to rectify it,” Ceth said.
“So, it can be healed,” Korsten said hopefully.
“No,” Eisleth responded. The word and the manner in which he joined Ceth at the bedside had the effect of having struck Korsten down with a precision casting of Wind and also of leaving him there to languor out of breath.
Korsten hated to think so of Eisleth or his actions, but the Mage-Superior felt decidedly darker this morning. Perhaps it was that, away from Ashwin and under the present circumstances, the world and everyone in it could only have felt darker. Himself especially. He felt that he had betrayed Merran.
Though in words, he hadn’t. They’d come to no agreements or decisions about the precise nature of their relationship. Korsten had always insisted to himself that he would have no one in that way—not completely—until he had resolved matters with Renmyr. And he had already felt similar guilt and argued with himself in the same manner when he and Merran discovered each other intimately. He was a fool. Of course, they’d offered each other no binding words and in the context of what was spoken there had been no betrayal, but in understanding….
Korsten began to second guess the thought as it was forming. What if that had not been true? What if Merran had been expecting him to adopt Ashwin’s open lifestyle? And was that what he had done? Had he now committed himself prematurely to Ashwin beyond what they had always had?
The previous night’s events chased across his mind if for no other reason than to remind him how easily he had fallen into them. It was easy because he loved Ashwin as well. But he was certain that he did not have the stamina to love the way Ashwin did, and even if he did, he felt equally certain that Merran would not abide that for long. He feared they would drift apart in heart, if not in person.
“If you’re prepared to listen,” Eisleth said.
Korsten’s focus snapped to the elder. “I apologize. I fear that I’m still not fully awake.”
Eisleth gestured toward the door and presumably, Korsten’s bed which lay beyond it.
Korsten was not prepared to go back to his bed yet, considering who he left lying within it and he was also not willing to leave Merran’s side without knowing what could be done for him.
“I’d like to stay,” Korsten sa
id to Eisleth. He brushed his hair back from his eye, tucking the overlong forelocks behind his ear. Most of them complied and the others were ignored while he took steps toward Merran’s bed. “I’m sorry.”
Ceth offered him a look of sympathy while Eisleth proceeded to explain. “Merran’s hand, as it is, is ruined. Left alone, he would never cast another spell with it and might well have to have it removed or carry it limp for the rest of his days.”
Korsten nodded, acknowledging the information, though the details spoken in such a manner brought the sting of tears to his eyes.
“But it will not be left alone,” Ceth added, ever merciful. “Though spell alone cannot heal the damage, magic combined with material will recover what might otherwise have been lost.”
Korsten could not imagine it. His faculties were not yet so willing this morning. But he didn’t have to imagine.
Ceth held both hands out before himself and within them manifested what appeared to be a length of ribbon. It was silvery in color and stiffer than mere fabric, yet it appeared quite pliable. Ceth extended the material across the bed, toward Eisleth. Without touching it, Eisleth extracted one end of the ribbon from Ceth’s hands and the rest followed. While Eisleth raised Merran’s hand at the wrist with one hand, he gestured in a circular motion around Merran’s hand with the other. The silver stream of material trailed his motion, settling against Merran’s hand and coiling around it, smoothing together as it covered the surface from his wrist to his fingertips.
While Korsten watched, he unconsciously closed the hand which held his sword material into a loose fist. He began to grasp at an understanding of what might have been going on, in essence. Watching the two ancient mages work, he held great hope. Optimism began to return, to such a degree that when Ashwin arrived in the doorway behind him, he not only was alert enough to know it, but he welcomed his mentor’s arrival with a smile. It was a smile for Merran as much as it was for Ashwin, but Merran was not conscious to receive it.
