Shadow Star

by Chris Claremont

  Franjean joined him, the pair of them dressed as they’d been in her dream.

  “Hah,” he said, his tone dismissive. “Don’t see a grin, ghost or otherwise. Face is turning t’other way altogether.”

  “That’s the trouble with Daikini. Their mouths, they’re built for frownin’.”

  “I dreamed…” she managed to say. “I thought I…”

  “You did,” Rool said, his mien turning serious. “There’s a Hook in you, Elora Danan.” He didn’t have to say whose hook, the way he capitalized the word spoke volumes. This was a power so feared he dared not speak its name. “Pack comes at your calling, sits at your feet, kills at your bidding, shows you the nature of the beast. Bad business.”

  “You defied them.”

  “Too dumb to live, that’s us,” said Franjean.

  “Think we’d let the likes o’ them lay claim to our Princess?” said Rool.

  “No more”—and she gritted her teeth, determined to forge her way through the entire thought—“than I would allow either of you to come to harm.”

  The effort almost shocked her dead asleep. As it was her eyes were mostly closed, her vision blurring with fatigue by the time she was done. That’s why she told herself it was some trick of the moment, a flaw in her perceptions, when she looked past the brownies’ ready smiles to the concern in their dark and hooded eyes. For the first time, she saw doubt.

  She didn’t know how long she slept but was thankful there were no more dreams. As consciousness returned, creeping across the landscape of her mind like a tide upon the shore, she enveloped herself in purely physical sensations, noting—like a student in her copybook—the crackling pops of wood in the hearth, the tang of hardwood smoke, the gloriously toasty feeling of being enveloped in rich, thick goose down.

  She was still cold. Not on the surface, but deep inside, to the pit of stomach and heart and soul. Somehow, she’d been cracked in two, as the continent was by the Wall, only she was wrapped in layers where the land was laid out flat. All the efforts being made to comfort the outside of the young woman had no effect on the heartland of her. There was found a roiling, ugly mass of foulness and putrescence and Elora quickly found it could no more be ignored than banished.

  To her credit, weak as she was, she tried both. She called on the meditation exercises taught her by Thorn to calm her thoughts and soothe her spirit. She reached out to the one special power that was her own and spoke to her body, reminding her torn flesh of what it had been like to be whole and unscarred, hoping that the act of healing her physical being might likewise help her soul. She dealt with the wounds in their turn, examining each for any infection and then purging what poison she found.

  It proved a clumsy, halting process. To Elora’s dismay, while the full force of her will could be focused as intently as ever she quickly discovered she had no stamina. She would complete one session of treatment and promptly forget what was next on her agenda. A seductive languor would come upon her and suddenly whole stretches of the day, or night, would vanish in what seemed to be a flash. There was no sense of sleep, no recollection of any dreams, but the shuttered windows of her room would be bright with sunlight shining through the slats one moment, the waryard beyond resounding with purposeful noise. The next, however, when she would have sworn on her life that she’d done no more than blink her eyes, all was still, the room around her painted in layers of midnight shadow, save for the glowing embers banked high in the hearth. Sometimes, her consciousness would flee right in the middle of a thought or, far more embarrassing, she’d find herself finishing a sentence begun the day before in conversation with someone altogether different.

  She understood fever, she understood exhaustion, but in neither case had Elora ever felt anything so profound. To her annoyance, none of her friends apparently had the slightest interest in helping her free of it. Three times a day, Thorn would visit her bedside, to check the clarity of her eyes, the sound of her breath, the force of her pulse. From his own bag of tricks, he offered herb tea to take the edge off the pain of her wounds and her own healing enchantments, and a rich wayfarer’s soup that was more stew than broth to build up her strength. If she was interested in talking, he’d stay to listen but since she usually just didn’t have the energy, he’d mostly take his leave, with the stock admonition that she drink plenty of fluids to keep her system hydrated.

  The brownies were just as solicitous, which wasn’t like them in the slightest. Usually, they could be counted on to pester her to the point of madness. She decided to ignore them.

  Once she began her own attempts at healing, however, Elora quickly feared she’d made a terrible mistake. Songs of Mending that had in the past knitted torn flesh seamlessly together, that had banished all taint of infection from her body, seemed suddenly to fall on deaf ears. Her power more often than not was like water spilling in a madcap cascade from a duck’s back without the slightest impact. Time after time, she would close the flaps of a wound only to wail in frustration as the bindings refused to hold. Desperately, she scaled back her field of influence, until she was working on fields no larger than a brownie’s hand, to no avail. Her best efforts only seemed to make matters worse, taxing her system to such an extent that her fever returned with a vengeance.

  Gradually, without realizing it herself, Elora slipped into a coma, a sleep so profound that some of those caring for her muttered that she would never awaken. Only Thorn and Khory and the brownies knew differently, that Elora had withdrawn inside herself to marshal all her strength and resources for this battle. But that knowledge was torture for them, because there was precious little they could do to help—a realization that prompted its own share of angry words between those longtime companions in arms.

  “Y’ just gonna let her fade away t’ nothing?” flared Rool to Thorn, as the Nelwyn gently bathed Elora’s brow with a damp, cool cloth.

  “I’m open to suggestions” was the infuriatingly calm reply.

  “Fangs, Nelwyn, you’re the sorcerer here. Tell me what herb t’ find, what talisman t’ steal, it’s yours. Cast some bloody spell or other! Save her, damn your eyes!”

  “She’s immune to magic, brownie!” Thorn said in return, his voice too flat and controlled, bespeaking an anger only barely restrained. As it was, power crackled from the corners of his eyes and the knuckles of his clenched fists, and there was at the back of his throat an aspect of roiling storm clouds preparing to hammer the ground with a monstrous thunderclap.

  “You’ve known that from the start,” the Nelwyn continued in that same dangerous tone, “as long as any of us. My enchantments have no hold on her, save perhaps to add a portion of my own strength to hers. But even there, Rool, she has to ask. If she doesn’t reach out for aid, I can’t force it on her.”

  “Damn foolish way t’ live, an’ you ask me,” offered Franjean.

  “No argument.”

  “What happens if she dies, then, Drumheller? What of the world, if its Savior is no more?”

  “I don’t know, Franjean.” For the first time, a doubt surfaced in Thorn’s thoughts, a niggling little thing as annoying as a seed stuck between his teeth, and as infernally difficult to dislodge: suppose prophecy is wrong, suppose we’ve made a mistake, suppose she isn’t the one. Angrily, he thrust that burst of heresy aside, only to find himself confronted by a wish that was far more bleak, because it came wrapped in the stale, tired air of the Malevoiy Realm: perhaps it would be better for us all, if she did die.

  With all his own strength of will, he denied both thoughts and banished them.

  Yet they would not go away.

  As for Elora, once more she burned, and once more she flew, and it was glorious beyond imagination. Her wings thrust her through the molten heart of Creation as easily as through the mantle of air that englobed it. Moving from one to the other was as simple as diving into a pool of water and each felt more comfortable to her than a
ny home she could remember.

  Her first thought was to label this a dream but experience taught her that it was far more. Dreams were the special province of the dragons, which were how they traveled to the other Realms and touched the lives of all who dwelled therein. Here was where the World That Was could be transformed by the hopes and imaginations of the dreamers into that which Might Yet Be.

  For Elora, this visit, that meant a world without strife, where there was no war, where the fate of everything no longer rested on the shoulders of one girl who considered herself painfully ill equipped for the role. No one wanted her, no one could demand things of her, no one had to die because of her. She was safe here, she was at peace.

  She was alone.

  There were no more dragons, she’d seen to that. And if the egg she carried in her travel pouch wasn’t allowed to hatch, there never would be again. No people, either, because each face she conjured came from the vault of her memory and carried with them a reminder of tasks left unfinished and responsibilities abandoned. Simply the world, a playground all her own, to remake as she pleased.

  A flaw in the smooth curve of the horizon caught her eye, a shrug of great shoulders shifting the plane and camber of her wings to bring her closer. At first she’d taken it for a knucklebone ridge, but that was only because she was so far away. The closer she came, the more stark and dramatic the arrangement of the range. There was no gentle transition leading up to them, plains giving way to foothills, to lesser highlands, until at last the climber came to this summit line of peaks. Instead, the mountains reared violently upward from the surrounding landscape, almost like spearpoints, bringing first warning of an invading army. Even more strange was the fact that they stood alone, on terrain that otherwise stretched flat and relatively unmarred in every direction for as far as Elora herself could see from on high.

  Something about the sight poked at Elora’s recollection but the specific memory proved fiendishly elusive. She beat her wings skyward, to get a view from above—which revealed a central valley, not so impressive from her perspective but quite the opposite, she mused, when seen from the ground—but she couldn’t bring herself to overfly the mountains directly. It made her nervous.

  Interesting, she told herself, as she swung through a lazy succession of tacks back and forth through the air to return her to the earth, how the natural arrangement of these peaks and valleys reminded her of the design of a castle fortress, with the valley as its central courtyard.

  The thought made her chuckle and she concluded that the opposite was more likely true, that the designers of those classic strongholds had taken their cues from nature. She never realized that, for all the time she was close to the peaks, she never once turned her back on them; that during her descent, she always turned toward them, never away.

  When at last her feet touched the ground, her dragon form melting from her to reveal the human figure at its heart, she was a fair distance removed from the range. The mountains remained an imposing sight at the horizon, but she didn’t stand in their shadow. Somehow that, too, seemed important.

  As a dragon her energy had seemed boundless. Returning to her normal self brought with it a painful reminder that the truth was otherwise. No sooner did her feet touch the earth than the rest of her followed suit as her body collapsed out from under her. She lay sprawled a fair while, soaked with sweat, racked with chills, obsessed with the need to draw breaths in and let them out.

  She’d landed by a stream, she lay on rich earth, she was enveloped by air, all that remained was fire to complete the four Great Realms that comprised the First Circle of Being, that of the World.

  Elora cast forth a piece of herself into the ground like a fisherman would cast a line into a lake, letting it fall fast and free to the molten heart of the globe. She thought to find friends there, the community of demon firedrakes who’d adopted her, was saddened to discover that the world’s core was as uninhabited as its surface. The Second Circle, that of the Flesh with all its myriad peoples, had yet to touch this place.

  She had more important concerns than philosophy, foremost among them her own survival. She grasped a fistful of fire and brought it up to her, grinning with irrepressible delight at how the radiant ball of liquid rock blazed before her. The raw heat was indescribable; if she let fall even a drop it would fuse the ground to glass on contact. By rights, the hand that held it should have burned to ash in an instant and all the surrounding vegetation set alight. But Elora had swum through the heart of the world and not been harmed. She had bonded with each of the Great Realms of the World in their turn, offering a portion of herself to them and accepting part of them into her in return. Many thought that since she was the Sacred Princess, that meant accepting the fealty of the Great Realms as their sovereign but hers had never been the power to command. In that regard, Thorn was far more powerful than she. With the proper spell, he could bend the most primal and powerful of forces and entities to his will. Even demons, should the need arise.

  Elora couldn’t force anyone to do anything. She had to ask for help, occasionally persuade, but most of all make friends. Unfortunately, at that particular task, she felt woefully inadequate. Everyone looked to her for salvation, yet the harder she worked, the worse things got.

  Do not despair, Danan. There is no need.

  She stirred where she lay, tried to rise to her feet, but only managed to lever herself onto an elbow at the sound of that familiar, tantalizing, desiccated voice. While she’d been lying there, the sun had vanished, her glade now cast in shadows so deep they were more appropriate to nighttime than dusk. A glance upward revealed the reason why. The mountain range had grown, or moved. What had been a safe and secure distance removed was now on her doorstep, slopes rising so high and steeply that she couldn’t even see the crest of the promontory ridgelines, much less the summits beyond.

  Come to Us, child. Join with Us. Let it be thy foes who art brought low, for now and evermore.

  With those words, her fatigue was gone. Her breath was still short, the hollowness to her chest still remained from her collapsed lung, and she knew that nothing substantial had been done to heal her wounds. This was enticement and promise. All she had to do was rise to her feet and a path would be revealed to her through the mountains. With each step would come Malevoiy strength until at the last she reached the central valley.

  We are the old, thou’rt the new. Learn from Our experience, Danan, let Us be reborn with thy youth. Take of Our stronghold and make it thine own. Here wilt thou ever be safe. None can do thee harm, all wilt pay thee homage. This war shall end, in a twinkling, in a trice. Victory will be thine. So much to gain. So small an act to bring it to pass.

  It was the longest speech she’d heard from the Malevoiy and it made sense. She stirred her feet, starting to shift position and balance so she could stand erect, and realized that she’d have to set aside her ball of molten incandescence. That gave her pause.

  On the one hand was salvation as a gift. Offered freely and apparently with no strings, but she knew there’d be a price. In the other, she held deliverance of her own making. No guarantees here, of victory or life itself, and in its own way the price exacted would be far higher.

  She didn’t want to make the choice, she didn’t want to make any choices.

  She heard a growl, low and rumbling, that resonated through her bones as much as her ears. There was warning to it, and challenge, and a heritage of enmity reaching back over a score of aeons, to the moment the Circle of the World gave rise to that of the Flesh. It was a gauntlet the Malevoiy recognized and It responded with a snarl of Its own.

  Foolish ancient, Elora thought wanly, this has nothing to do with you. The insight surprised her. Both warning and challenge are to me.

  She moved her head as best she could, swept her eyes around her for a glimpse of the source of the growl, but found the world as empty as before, save for herself and the Malevoiy.
There was a path now, into the mountains. Simply looking toward it made her blood sizzle with anticipation and she suddenly could swear she heard the faint and distant baying of a hunting pack of Death Dogs. They wanted to follow her, not as prey but as their leader.

  “No,” she said aloud in the softest of tones, meaning her refusal to be final and absolute, but her thoughts betrayed her with a qualification: not yet.

  Anger got the better of her then and she paid for it in full measure. With a reflexive snarl that was mainly frustration she thrust the fire she’d caught into the center of her chest, into her own heart.

  At first, she couldn’t scream, for all the muscles of her body had suddenly turned to adamantine steel. Each pump of her heart cast forth a jet of flame, surging down the great vessels right to her toes, then back again the other way to the crest of her skull, which she was certain would instantly explode and thankfully end her torment. She rolled herself into a tiny hedgehog ball, then felt her whole body arch like a drawn bow until she was poised on heels and head like a baby having a hissy fit, at last giving voice to the fire threatening to consume her with a bellow that encompassed the whole spectrum of pain, as it did of pleasure.

  In that selfsame instant, blind instinct drove Elora to hurl herself into the raging torrent within herself and battle her way to the crest of the surging wave of fire. There she had to ride it, as in childhood from her tower she’d seen the young men of Angwyn do the surf off Point Redoubt. The stakes were absolute. All those lads on the coast risked if the wave got the better of them were thumped skulls and the occasional broken bone. Untamed as it now was, this fire Elora had summoned would surely consume her. It was a purely natural force and as she’d learned too often to her sorrow, she was as vulnerable to them as anyone.

  To her advantage, she’d spent much of the past few years as an apprentice to Torquil, master forger of the Rock Nelwyns, a distant cousin of Thorn Drumheller whose people worked with stone the same way Drumheller’s branch of the family did with soil, as farmers. She’d proved herself a gifted student. Indeed, of all the cardinal elements, fire came most naturally to her.