Elfland

by Freda Warrington

  “Dad.” Sam knelt, extending a hand to his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  “Brawth is coming for me,” panted Lawrence. “I can’t let it take Lucas. Must draw it away. I have to keep running.”

  “No,” said Sam. “It’s all right. We’re with you now.”

  “Why wouldn’t they believe me?” Lawrence’s voice was shredded raw with despair.

  “Hey, Rosie and I weren’t part of the lynch mob. They didn’t let us in on the plot. I tried to stop it—really pathetic last-minute effort, I know—but I did try.”

  “You couldn’t have stopped it. Nothing could. It was time. I must . . .” He lurched to his feet, took a stumbling step and fell. Sam caught hold of him. “Let me go!” He struggled for a few seconds, but Sam held on until he slumped to the ground, defeated.

  “Dad, stop it. What are you trying to do?”

  “I have to run. To draw it away. It’s coming. Can’t you feel it?”

  “Yes, we feel it, but running isn’t going to help. You’re only in our back garden. You must have been going in circles.”

  “I know.” Lawrence squeezed his eyes shut, his face all lines of pain. “It’s everywhere. Inside my head. I thought I’d be braver than this.” The wind took on a mourning note and the clouds grew thick and dark, lit from inside by lashing fires.

  “No one’s feeling very brave, believe me. We’ll help you.”

  “You can’t. I unleashed it. Now it won’t be satisfied until it finds me and I thought I was ready to meet it but I’m not—I must, but I don’t know how . . .”

  Rosie knelt beside him. Her instinct was to console him but he was still Lawrence Wilder; she couldn’t touch him. “What will happen if you don’t face . . . Brawth?”

  “It will rage until it’s consumed everything,” said Lawrence, “leaving only the dry husk of Dumannios behind. It will pursue me forever—I must face it or it will consume my sons to reach me. I thought I was strong enough but I’m weak. The fear disables us. That is its strength, using fear on us as spiders use poison—to paralyze us.”

  “And if you confront it?” said Sam.

  “Then . . . Brawth might be satisfied.” His voice was raw and broken. “If I could make it fixate only upon me, it might pass over my dear sons and all the others. If I dared to meet it—if I were strong enough—if it burned out its rage upon me, then this might all be over.”

  “And you might stop being afraid,” Sam breathed.

  “No.” Lawrence raised himself and pushed back his wild hair. “Although, in fact, my fear doesn’t matter. To stand and face it, that’s the important thing. The degree of terror I feel in that moment is irrelevant. To stand . . .”

  “I’ll fight it with you,” said Sam.

  “And me,” Rosie added.

  Lawrence gave a short laugh. “You can’t fight it. I have to . . .” His hands, white claws, opened and closed. “Have to take a stand, but I don’t want it to take me without warning. I need to be ready for it.”

  Rosie and Sam looked at each other. She saw that Sam, behind his composure, was completely distraught, but she knew he never shied away from hard decisions. Raising her voice above the thunder, she said, “Mr. Wilder, is there a place that would help you feel strong against it? Stonegate?”

  “No, not there.” He gasped, shook his head. Rosie sensed any suggestion she made would be hopeless. “I need a place that would draw it to me yet slow its progress as it came, so that I could be ready. Somewhere that would bind us to each other, so that it can’t stop coming towards me, but I can’t escape, either. I don’t know what I’m thinking of.”

  “There is somewhere,” she said.

  Lawrence grinned, mirthless and condescending. “You can’t help me, my dear.”

  Rosie’s lips tightened. “The spiral garden,” she said, knowing with clear intuition that she was right. She described it. It was difficult to speak coherently against the roar of the wind but Lawrence seemed to understand. “My father said the spiral invokes the Otherworld. If nothing else, it’s a calm space. You might feel better there.”

  “Why did you build it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rosie. “Inspiration. Compulsion.”

  “You built it for me,” he said, almost accusing. “You knew.”

  “No.” She drew away from him, unnerved.

  “Take me there. Quickly.” He was rising shakily as he spoke. “Must keep moving, I can’t stay here.”

  They helped him down the hill as if dodging enemy fire. Lightning seared an oak tree two hundred yards away with a detonation that left her ears ringing. Flames leapt into the night. Sam urged them step by step down the bracken-lined tracks, supporting Lawrence between them. Still the black-bright image of Brawth pressed painfully on her vision. Rosie’s eyes streamed and she felt faint from pain and dread, but it was only a grim background to the urgency of helping Lawrence.

  The wind was fearsome even in the valley, clawing at them as they fought through the gap in Oakholme’s hedge. A hail of twigs and leaves battered them. Within the spiral garden itself, however, the air turned absolutely still.

  Their feet made a soft crunching on the gravel as they led Lawrence around the spiral path to the egg at the center. As soon as he was there he became calmer. He stood up straight and Rosie saw the terror fall physically from him. Her headache eased, and she even forgot to pay attention to her fear.

  Lawrence sat down on the stone egg at the center and released a long, deep sigh. Above, the sky crazed with forks of liquid fire. “Thank you, Rosie,” he said. “This is where I need to be. You must have known.”

  “I didn’t.” She gave an uneasy laugh. “Not consciously, anyway.”

  “Still, this is why you built it, even if you weren’t aware. Thank you. Sam, I regret that you should ever have seen me like this. I’m so ashamed.”

  “Dad, no. Don’t be ashamed.” Sam’s voice cracked. “No one said you weren’t allowed to fall off your pedestal, except you.”

  “You can leave me now. I’ll wait here.”

  “No chance,” Sam said. He knelt at his father’s feet. “We’ll stay with you.”

  Lawrence smiled. He looked up. “Here I am, poised over the Abyss.”

  The scene was colored dusty red and the wind circled ominously around the still eye. They sensed the unseen giant roaring its steady, inexorable way towards them. Rosie stayed on her feet. Sam reached up to clasp her hand where it rested on his shoulder.

  “What is it,” Sam asked, “this shadow, Brawth?”

  “It’s my fylgia,” Lawrence answered. “It’s part of me. When Aetherials have inner demons, they manifest on a cosmic scale.”

  “Are you sure, though, that it’s all from you?”

  A frown creased the high, pale forehead. “We can’t be sure of anything, but I work from that theory. If it’s more, it’s still my fault. My fylgia attached to Brawth, or absorbed it or woke it or became it . . . the result is the same.”

  “So only you can control it?”

  His father smiled thinly. “I can’t control it. That’s the point. It took me years to understand that it’s not separate but part of me, and that’s why it persecutes me and my blood.”

  “Explain,” said Sam. “Quick, while we’re still alive.”

  “When I left Sibeyla, part of me was torn out and kept hostage in the Other world.” Lawrence’s voice was rapid and faint. “It’s Albin’s revenge. Not that I hold him responsible; I only blame myself, because I spent years running from it.”

  “Revenge for what, Dad?” He took his father’s hand. Rosie had never seen that happen before.

  “Albin resented Liliana’s power bypassing him and coming straight to me. He held the belief that Aelyr are superior to Vaethyr, that we degrade ourselves by leaving the Spiral. He wanted me to stay in Sibeyla, but I followed Liliana to Earth and he never forgave me. Before I left, he showed me a piece of Elfstone carved with spirals and symbols of binding. He told me that my soul-e
ssence was trapped within it and would always remain imprisoned in the Otherworld. And it’s true; I have no heart, no soul, no core, have I? I never cared for my family as I should. I couldn’t love. But the essence is not the fylgia. The fylgia is the shadow-self. The essence is the part of me that would have kept the shadow in balance; but because it was missing, the shadow was able to grow monstrous.”

  A piece of albinite carved with spirals.

  Rosie’s free hand flew to her face. The Greenlady’s voice whispered like a lost memory, Haven’t you heard the story, girl, about the soul trapped in a jewel in an egg in a box in a bag in a nest in a tree . . . “Oh my god,” she said.

  “Rosie?” said Sam, but she’d already torn her hand out of his and was running up the spiral—tempted to take a sensible shortcut, but knowing she must not disturb the energy—and across the garden and bursting at last through the back door of Oakholme.

  The inside of the house was writhing. Walls were unstable, shadows moved, ghost forms of grotesque beasts thrust out of surfaces only to melt back again. Even the floor was treacherous, rising and falling in waves. Her breath condensed on the freezing air.

  Rosie put out her hands to guide herself. This was Dumannios, she realized. It was the writhing horror that lay under the skin of reality, in the subconscious. It can’t hurt me, she thought, but couldn’t convince herself. Reality and the gentle Dusklands had been flayed off, leaving the raw ugliness of nightmares to break through, there inside Oakholme, which had always been safe.

  Perhaps for humans none of this was happening. Perhaps their surface world was still intact, and it was only Vaethyr who’d been torn out of it. As she entered the hallway she wondered where her parents and brothers were—but there was no time to find them.

  Hall and stairs and landing tilted around her in flashes of lightning as she ran upstairs to her room. Although the walls moved like cobwebs, the bedroom was still the shape she recognized, her belongings in the same place. She explored her bedside table until she found the cold smooth solidity of the egg. It glowed as pink as a living heart in the gloom.

  As she retraced her route, the stairs swayed and dropped under her so that she nearly fell, narrowly saving herself on the banister. The kitchen had almost gone, replaced by a roiling cavern of demons—images of Brawth in a shattered hologram. She struggled across like a sailor across the deck of a pitching ship. Sightless she groped her way to the door, found her way out and made another frantic, stumbling run across the lawns.

  The whole world had become Dumannios, she realized. Fire and ice. She tried to shake off the chaos, to sidestep into the Dusklands or the surface, but there was no escape. The red sky cracked with terrible pressure.

  Brawth was close. She felt it all around her, a sparkling blackness that deformed the air. She must reach the center of the spiral before it came. A lightning bolt detonated near the house and she ducked, her ears ringing.

  Inside the hedge, she halted. She was too late. She saw the dark featureless form—flaring like an eclipse, yes, that was what it resembled, the inky center and the blinding corona—but the shape of it was humanoid, broad as a bull at the top, horned—a minotaur figure. Slow yet unstoppable, it drifted around the first curve of the spiral towards Lawrence.

  Her heart threatened to burst.

  “Lawrence!” she yelled. “Sam! Here—catch!”

  And she threw the quartz egg.

  Sam watched Brawth coming. He rose to his feet and stood behind his father with his hands protectively on his shoulders. Lawrence felt bony, and he was shaking. He remained seated, his feet planted and his spine straight.

  “Go, Sam,” he said.

  “I’m staying,” Sam answered.

  “I have done nothing to deserve such a son.”

  “I could take that one of two ways.”

  “Then take it in the best way,” his father said quietly.

  A muscular breeze began to buffet them, as if the eye of the storm had moved. It was like a hot wind from a bonfire. Ever-changing, the shadow giant came. Thunder rumbled, but Brawth itself was silent. Sam’s gaze was riveted to it. Flickering darkness and brightness. It was elusive, like spots dancing in the vision after a blow to the head. It was there and not there, hallucinatory, a weird artifact of the storm, the Devil conjured from Lawrence’s nightmares. His heart started to thump. He had nothing to fight it with but still, no one would ever say he’d left his father to face it alone.

  Then he heard Rosie’s yell. Lawrence didn’t react, but Sam did. He turned, saw the flying missile, reached out and felt it smack into his palm. He had no idea why Rosie had fled or why she was throwing stones at him, but it must be for a reason. The moment he opened his hand and saw the rose-quartz egg, he knew.

  “Dad.” He shook him. “Look!”

  Lawrence turned his slow gaze to the stone without comprehension. Sam found the invisible line around it and fumbled to twist it open. It wouldn’t shift. The vast silent black-flame entity came steadily curving around the spiral towards them.

  “Fuck!” Sam yelled, and in desperation cracked the egg on a hunk of granite. It split. Sam plucked the tablet of albinite out of it and shoved it into his father’s hand.

  “What is this?” Lawrence stared. The symbols carved in the stone shone. “Where did you get it? How?”

  “Long story. Oh, shit . . .” The blackness that came rushing softly towards them was a door into the Abyss. Sunfire flared around it. Sam was abruptly, mortally terrified. “Come on, what do we do with it, for chrissakes?”

  Lawrence said nothing. He opened his mouth and put the jewel on his tongue. He swallowed. Then he stood up, arms spread wide as if to embrace Brawth, and all Sam saw after that was two great columns of light, the second the negative of the first, a bright core within a black corona. Meeting, merging.

  He felt his hair stand on end, the air vaporize around him. A millisecond later there was a blast of heat, a deafening crack, a spear of white fire. Then utter darkness.

  The blast threw Rosie into the air and she hit the ground yards away. She landed with her hip on a rock. The pain was so excruciating that she couldn’t breathe.

  Sight returned. She felt tears and dirt streaking her face. After that, she noticed that the red glow of Dumannios had dimmed to grey; and then, that huge drops of rain were beginning to spatter around her.

  Groaning, she managed to get onto her hands and knees, and finally onto her feet, trying very hard to breathe through the pain so that she did not actually start crying. Clouds rolled thickly above her; lightning still glimmered but distant now, drifting away.

  “Sam? Lawrence?” she called, picking her way towards the center of the spiral.

  No answer. Only silence.

  “Sam,” she sobbed, losing her breath.

  Lawrence and Sam both lay where they’d fallen beside the stone egg. Rosie knew they were dead, even before she took Sam’s lifeless hand. Although there was no mark on the ground around them, the bodies themselves were blackened, the eyes slightly open in thin slivers of white against the soot. There was nowhere for Lawrence’s essence to have gone, Rosie knew, except into Brawth: into the Abyss. And Sam . . . he would never leave his father.

  Rosie bent over their bodies with her head in her hands. The rain quickened, drops becoming rods, drenching the world, washing it clean.

  25

  Dawn

  When the rain eased at last, Sapphire looked up through the silvery gloom. Her hair hung plastered in wet strings down her back; she was soaked through, numb. It was over. She gazed up at the torn, paling sky, and thought how sweet and fresh the world smelled after a storm.

  So she’d had her revenge, fulfilled her promise to her father, and what did it mean?

  “Nothing,” she said. She rose to her feet, realizing suddenly that she never had to see any of them, ever again. She smiled.

  “So I leave you, Lawrence, as I arrived,” she said. “With nothing.” She took off the jacket of her ritual costume a
nd threw it down, leaving it behind like a shed skin as she walked away. “Goodbye, Lawrence. Goodbye, Stonegate. Goodbye, dear Papa.”

  Stumbling into Oakholme, Rosie couldn’t find anyone at first. The living room was a mess; the last bolt of lightning had blown out a window. Then she realized that a strange, heaped mound in the corner, covered in fallen plaster and broken glass, was a tangle of people. A transformed Matthew was lying across her parents and her aunt and uncle, for all the world like a feline mother protecting kittens. His fur was thick with dust.

  “Help me,” she said.

  They stirred. Debris fell from them as they slowly disentangled themselves. Matthew looked up and stared at her, settling back to his ordinary human shape again, a dazed expression on his face. They were all alive, she saw. Pale, shocked, bleeding from various wounds—but they’d survived. Dumannios had gone; the world was solid again.

  Stumbling, her mother rushed to embrace her. “God, Rosie. What happened?”

  She could barely get the words out. “Sam and Lawrence . . .” She pointed to indicate the outside world. “Please, help me.”

  ___________

  Lucas and Iola were in the sitting room off the great hall, pressed up against the French windows to watch the rain. The garden was a mess of broken trees and torn foliage. The sudden, abrupt end of Brawth’s attack had left Luc too stunned to think. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll make us a drink. I’ve actually gone past being scared, haven’t you?”

  “With you, I’m not afraid,” she said, turning her gold-leaf eyes to him.

  In the kitchen, Lucas lit a candle. Since the electric kettle wouldn’t work, he set a saucepan of water to boil on the gas burner. While he waited, he tried to call Oakholme, but the line was dead, and he had no cell phone.

  “Luc?” called a voice. Jon appeared, looking horrible. Sallow skin, bruised eyes, congealed blood all over him. He staggered in and slumped into a chair opposite.

  “You came round, finally,” said Lucas. “You all right?”