Final Passage (The Prisoner and the Sun #3)

by Brad Magnarella

You can make this so?

  “I can make it so.”

  Iliff was dimly aware that he should be focused on something else—indeed, that he had been focused on something else—but there were fissures here. Fissures that needed to be sealed. And if he did not help seal them, there was no telling what might become of the boy, of that place.

  “You have but to step through,” she repeated.

  He watched the boy follow the fissure with his trowel, watched the fissure disappear as though it were being unmade. Yes, he thought. Something was going to happen if he did not go through. Something precious would be lost. Lost forever.

  He stepped onto the stone threshold.

  And now he found himself behind the boy. So close that he could smell the oil of his hair, could hear his diligent young breaths. He sensed he had only to step from the threshold to become him once more.

  But at that moment, the boy turned and called for more mortar. And the suddenness with which his face appeared before Iliff, with his large dark eyes, his soft angles and cleft chin, recalled to Iliff’s mind an encounter from long ago. And suddenly Iliff remembered he had a friend here.

  A friend named Yuri.

  Iliff stepped from the threshold.

  “I cannot,” he said.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes,” he said, pulling the door to. “The moment I thought of Yuri, I felt him inside his cell. All of this time and there he has remained. Had I never learned of the world outside, never learned of the Sun, there I would have remained as well. But I have come too far. Experienced too much. I am no longer a prisoner.”

  “No, Iliff,” she said. “No, you are not.”

  He listened to her step nearer.

  “You have now denied all of the walls you once surpassed, but that still held power over you, however much or little. You have just now denied your earliest wall, the wall of Perfect Ignorance. Before that, the wall of Naiveté. Before that, Reclusion—your swamp. One seeks Reclusion when Naiveté falls, as yours fell in the forest. It is one’s attempt to return to Ignorance. Before that, I showed you the wall that separates Light and Darkness. And before that, the wall that separates Life and Death.”

  The red door with his old trowel handle disappeared, but Adramina remained. Iliff could feel her in the darkness beside him. He could smell her mild fragrance becoming rich and earthen.

  “And now,” she said, her voice growing, “now you may look upon me. As I truly am.”

  Iliff turned to where the darkness swelled and shimmered. All at once, a great light burst forth. Iliff raised his arm, but he saw that it was a dark light. A shadow without form or dimension, but that was nonetheless illuminating, as though something powerful shone just beyond. From the center of the shadow emerged, not Adramina, but an enormous being, at once beautiful and terrible, mirthful and tragic, with a deep face of many iridescent eyes that reflected inside one another and shone many colors. A dance of roots veined the diaphanous wings still unfolding from her back. As the being rose, her great illuminating shadow fell over him.

  Slowly, Iliff lowered his arm.

  “Behold, I am a prism,” she spoke. “I am pure light refracted into all of the manifestations of the Earth. All things that are ever-changing, that having lived, must also die. I am everything feared and desired. Everything hoped for and denied. None may look upon the Sun who cannot first look upon me.”

  Iliff lowered his eyes. And when he did, he was surprised to find one of her lights refracting on him. And he understood that the refracted light with its related shadow was him. When he looked up, her many eyes loomed. The air shook and stormed around him. Her wings became the jaws of a giant mouth. But Iliff remained standing before her, his face upturned.

  And in her eyes, Iliff beheld all of the places he had been as well as all of the places he might have gone. He beheld all of the people and creatures he had known, as well as all of those he might have known. He saw Skye and Tradd. But the people and places did not draw him in now, not even the ones he loved most dearly, for he knew that they remained, and would always remain, inseparable from himself. And even the ones he had not loved in life, the ones who led him astray, he felt a certain affinity for as well. They, too, were parts of himself.

  “I see you,” he spoke to the Prism.

  Iliff grew his awareness from his chest until he became as large as the being before him. The Prism became larger. Once more, Iliff expanded himself, and the Prism responded, her wings becoming as great as twin mountains. Iliff willed himself larger still. This went on until, at last, the being’s wings shuddered and crashed closed, swallowing Iliff in their embrace.

  Iliff fell. He fell a long way.

  And now tresses of chestnut hair cascaded down, and it was Adramina holding him, her mist-colored gown flowing around him. Soft light illuminated the earthen walls of her dwelling. She held him close, as a mother holding her son.

  “Go now,” she whispered. “Go to the Sun and look upon it. Go to the Sun and be free of me.”

  When she stood away, her green eyes glistened with tears.

  * * *

  When Iliff opened his eyes, Tradd was stooped over him, his eyebrows thick with ice.

  “There you are,” Tradd said. “I’ve been shaking and calling you for the last hour.”

  When Iliff sat up, he saw that they were no longer in the cleft in which they had slept. In fact, it looked to be late the following day. They were perched on a stone shelf, barely wide enough for him, much less Tradd. Iliff began to shiver, but when he raised his face, he stopped suddenly.

  “We’re… we’re here?”

  Tradd pointed. “There’s another shelf up there. And above the shelf are what look like steps. Steps that lead right through. I can see them every once in a while when the clouds shift.”

  Iliff looked on the dense, drifting cloud ceiling in wonder.

  “But the shelf’s too high,” Tradd finished. “I can’t reach it.”

  “Is there no way around?”

  “There’s no time to look.”

  Iliff turned to Tradd. “What do you mean?”

  Tradd’s eyes swam over his deep frown. “You’re becoming like Skye,” he said. “You’re not waking up.”

  When Iliff reached for Tradd’s hand, he was surprised at how slender his fingers had become. Was he like this all over? he wondered. His arms, his legs? It was little wonder Tradd was so concerned.

  “I know it is hard to understand,” Iliff said. The frigid air jostled his words together. “But I’m all right, Tradd.”

  “No.” Tradd shook his head. “No you’re not.”

  “You must trust me.”

  “You’re dying,” Tradd said. “And I’m not going to let you. Not here.”

  Before Iliff could respond, Tradd lifted him and stood him on his shoulders, his cold, thick hands wrapping around his knees.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Reach for the shelf,” Tradd called up to him. “Reach!”

  The sternness of Tradd’s voice surprised Iliff into stretching his arms overhead. Tradd hoisted him higher. Iliff patted his hands up the stone wall, soon encountering the icy edge of the high shelf. His fingers curled over it.

  “Pull!” Tradd called.

  Iliff strained with what strength remained in him, his muscles drawing into taut strings. He felt Tradd shift his hands to the undersides of his boots and give a final heave. And with that, Iliff managed to boost his upper body onto the shelf, but still his legs wandered in space.

  “Get your knee over!”

  Iliff pulled in his right knee until it, too, was on the shelf, then used it to lever the rest of him forward. He lay on the shelf gasping, his vision becoming dim. When he raised his head, he saw that the shelf was in fact the bottommost in the series of steps that Tradd had seen.

  “Are you all right?” Tradd called up.

  “Yes,” Iliff answered. “What about you?”

  “I’m going to look for another way
up.”

  Iliff peered over the edge and onto Tradd’s upturned face. His companion looked small and far away.

  “I’ll wait,” Iliff said.

  “No,” Tradd said. “There’s no time for you.”

  Iliff turned and looked up the stone steps. When he looked back, Tradd was gone.

  Iliff called his name, but no answer came. He remained looking over the windswept ledge. He had wanted to give him Salvatore’s bag, in case there was not another way up. In case this was his last time seeing him.

  He waited, but when Tradd did not reappear, he turned and reached for the first step.

  Chapter 28

  Iliff raised his head and squinted into the bitter air. The steps continued in a steep, snaking climb. Their coldness bruised his hands and knees. Once more he attempted to stand, but his legs folded beneath him, dropping him back to the stone. The clouds climbed around him, so dense that it felt that he was no longer on the Mountain, but laying within some great emptiness. He remained there a long time, heavy, drifting thoughts bidding him sleep.

  At last he forced his eyes open and found his hands and knees once more. Bowing his head to the wind, he pulled himself up the next step.

  What time passed, Iliff could not tell. The wind pressed the cold into a low hum that deadened everything. Though Iliff’s movements slowed, though he could scarcely feel himself, he willed his body over each step that emerged from the clouds, conscious only of keeping his limbs moving. Now and again, Skye and Tradd appeared before him as fragmented images. They did not speak or beckon to him, but simply watched. When they disappeared again, Iliff’s awareness contracted back around his lonely sequence: Lift, press, drag. Lift, press, drag.

  On and on, unto his death, it felt.

  It was only when Iliff fell forward that he realized the winds and clouds had relented. He raised his face and blinked, startled to find the Mountain’s summit looking back at him. It was not a pointed peak, as he had expected, but a small plateau, as though the peak had been sheared away. All around it stood great upthrusts of stone. The steps wound between two such stones before joining the high table.

  And above the table was a thing Iliff had never seen.

  He arrived on the plateau numb and breathless. But when he struggled to his feet this time, he remained standing. The air was silent and still here. Impossibly still. Iliff looked around. It was as if he were on an island. Beneath him, the topsides of clouds boiled away in all directions like a restive ocean. And above him, for as far as he could see—and beyond, it seemed—stood a dome of blue.

  Iliff smiled as he leaned his head back. It was the blue of Skye’s eyes. The blue of the sky. It was just as Salvatore had once described it and was more perfect and profound than anything he had ever beheld.

  He laughed now. His journey, whose first steps had been descending ones, carrying him beneath the earth to the bottom of his prison, had delivered him here, at last, to the very top of the world. He looked on the blue, waiting for it to pale and become pure light, as it had for Salvatore. More laughter rattled from his chest. Yes, any moment, he told himself. Any moment and it would be there before him. He would be able to look upon it. Skye would see it too. Together they would look upon it and know at last who they were and where they came from.

  But the more time that passed, the less certain became Iliff’s vigil. At length he noticed the blue around him deepening. Darkening. The light was not growing, but thinning. He stumbled from one end of the high table to the other, craning his neck to the sky.

  Where was it? Where was the light? Where was the Sun?

  The sky continued to dim as more coldness crept in. His jaw began to shudder, and he wrapped his arms around himself. Through his coat he felt the starkness of his ribs. His exhaustion from the climb returned suddenly, and he staggered in a circle to keep his footing.

  “Where are you?” he cried weakly.

  As if in answer, there sounded a small cough. Iliff turned. It had come from one of the stones. Iliff looked on it in confusion. The stone coughed a second time, and now someone appeared from behind it. He was slight and sagging, save for two shocks of white hair that quivered with each one of his scuffing steps. He leaned on a short staff, pausing here and there to clear his throat into his fist. At last the old man stopped before Iliff and raised his wizened face.

  “Where is who?” he asked, looking around them.

  “I know you,” Iliff whispered.

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes, yes, you are the man from the prison. The same one who told me the story of Salvatore and—and the Sun.”

  “A prison, you say?” The old man propped his chin on the top of his staff. His face crinkled around eyes that tilted skyward in thought. “Now that has something of a familiar ring to it.”

  His gray uniform had been exchanged for white vestments, Iliff saw, but certainly it was the same man. Or was it? Iliff reached forward with his awareness, reached throughout the old man’s presence, but he was difficult to feel, as though he were nowhere and yet everywhere. When next the man coughed into his fist, it sounded like a chuckle. And then Iliff recalled who the old man had been, and he realized that this was not the same person from the prison, for that had been the prison-self of…

  “Salvatore?”

  “Hm?” The man blinked his gaze back to Iliff.

  “Yes, you’re Salvatore. Look, this is yours.” Iliff drew his bag around to the front of his body.

  The old man reached forward and, with a knotted finger and thumb, took one of the bag’s folds and rubbed it together.

  “Burlap,” he said simply.

  “Yes, yes! I found it behind the large stone in the lowest room in the prison, the room with the five-pointed crevice. You’d left it there for your friend, for your prison-self, before your own escape. I’ve carried it all this time.”

  The man looked around as if he were losing interest in their conversation. He even began to push out a raspy song from his half-pursed lips. But when his dark pupils wandered back to Iliff, they paused and then shimmered with some remembrance. “Oh, yes,” he mumbled. He propped the staff against the front of his body and patted his robe with both hands.

  “Aha,” he said at length. “Here it is.”

  His hand disappeared into one of the many folds of his robes and emerged holding what appeared to be a small package. He held it out to Iliff, who took it and looked it over. Iliff removed the contents from their pack and splayed them out a bit. They were faded, but he recognized them.

  “My playing cards,” he said.

  “Yes,” said the old man. “Your sacrifice.”

  Iliff looked from the cards to the mysterious old man, whose eyes twinkled now.

  “I trust you found the recompense to have been just?”

  Iliff thought of the simple games he used to play with them to pass the time in his cell. He thought then of his escape beyond those same walls and the extraordinary journey that had become his life.

  “Yes,” was all he could think to say.

  “Very good, young master. Very good.” The old man’s gaze began to wander again.

  “But I don’t understand,” Iliff said. “Are you the fellow from the prison or are you Salvatore? And if you are the fellow from the prison, how did you come to arrive here? And if you are Salvatore, what are you still doing here?”

  The old man chuckled, pretending to stagger beneath the questions.

  “Well, which are you?”

  When the old man straightened, his face seemed to grow serious, though it was difficult for Iliff to tell in the waning light.

  “Why should I have to be one or the other?”

  “Who are you, then?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  Iliff shook his head.

  “I am that which you seek. I am the Sun.”

  Chapter 29

  Iliff examined the old man’s face for the least hint of humor, but already his expression was falling slack. Salvatore stifled a
yawn and scratched his staff against the stone, as if it were no longer a walking aid to him, but rather something to fidget with and perhaps toss away later.

  “You’re the…? How can that be?”

  “How can what be?”

  “You were a prisoner once, like me. You escaped from there. You journeyed through deep, dark places and over lands strange and wonderful—it’s what you told your prison-self. Or at least, it’s what your prison-self told me that you told him.” Iliff shook his head at the confusion of it all. He suddenly felt like a boy again. “The point is, you sought the Sun. All that time you sought the Sun, just as I have been seeking the Sun. So for you to tell me now that you are the Sun…”

  Salvatore lifted his head, a sudden thought appearing to have come to him. “Would you like to see something?” he asked.

  Without waiting for a response, he took Iliff’s arm and walked him to the edge of the plateau. The sky had dimmed to a deep blue except for a halo in the far west, which still held its pale. Beneath the plateau, the clouds appeared more placid now, as though preparing to bed down for the night.

  “Look there,” Salvatore said, pointing with his staff.

  “Yes? I see nothing but clouds.”

  “No, not with your eyes.”

  Iliff reached forth with his awareness. He reached beyond the clouds. And suddenly it was as though light were emanating from him, illuminating everything, for he could see beyond the clouds all the way to the wide world below. And he could see so much of it and in vivid detail.

  “These are all of the places I have been,” Iliff whispered.

  For he could see the Great Sea with its gales and ancient serpents and giant blooms of seaweed, one of them still mulling his story. He saw the pale blue lands beyond where the township of Fythe and Garott labored and celebrated the seasons and traded with the settlements farther east. He saw the brown band of the swamp with its magical resurrecting creatures. He even saw the burgeoning forest beyond, green with Troll’s vitality.

  “It all seems so close,” Iliff said, “and at the same time, so distant.”