The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

  Instead, they stood, watching the exchange. They hadn’t moved from the spot, and Iyana realized no time at all had passed for them, though some wore strained expressions and raised brows. Talmir was busy helping divide the wounded among those who would carry them back. He still clutched his sword, and Sen still lay empty while Ceth knelt in his forever spot.

  “I see you’ve rediscovered your good sense,” the Eastern Dark said. “It always came quicker to you than the others. I’m surprised to see you resist it so. But then, there’s always been more of fox than man in you.”

  Iyana felt the disgust well up in her gut. She tasted bitterness in the back of her throat. Pevah’s look was defeat. He let his hands fall to his sides, and the shield of time she had come to fear like nothing else flashed but did not fade.

  “You will let me die in my own way,” Pevah said. He made as if to turn from the spot, but lingered on the Eastern Dark. After a few tense moments, the other nodded once.

  Pevah walked past them without looking back. His eyes were straight ahead, and in her anger Iyana thought him a coward to refuse to meet her own. She looked to the Eastern Dark as Karin stepped between them once more, weaponless hands shaking with fear for her and with the knowledge that he could do nothing against the Sage the Emberfolk had feared before and above all others.

  “You’re going to let him go?” she asked, nearly reaching out to snatch Pevah by the crook of the arm. He looked so frail, now, so much more like the old man she had first come upon than the sleek and deadly Fox of the West. He ignored her.

  “You mistake the situation, Faeykin,” the Eastern Dark said, and Iyana read mockery in his tone. “It is I who lets him go.” He nodded at his brother’s back. “To die in the way he sees fit.”

  The Sage of the Red Waste made his aching way east, toward the bloody rise where his desert children mended their wounds and cried over the dead of both companies and forgot the painted warriors of the north; where Talmir and the Valley soldiers eyed him with suspicion and aimed their blood-crusted weapons behind him toward the Sage he would no longer fight.

  “That’s it?” Iyana cried. “The enemy of the World and all in it stands before us, and we’re going to let him go?” She had never felt such cold despair and hot anger, melded into a nauseating whole. She could tell Karin wanted to stop her making a fatal mistake, but he was angry too, his eyes roving and settling on Creyath’s still and already-forgotten form.

  The Eastern Dark eyed her with a gentle surprise that held an edge of warning. She didn’t care.

  “You think us weak,” she said, stalking toward him. She brushed by Karin and tore her hand from his tired grasp as the Sage squared to meet her. “You think the Embers are the only Landkist in the World that can threaten you.”

  That crooked smile she had imagined before came real. The Eastern Dark glanced toward the east. His look would have told Pevah he was about to smite this foolish girl from the flats and all her life with her, if the other had bothered to turn. But on he walked, broken and sad, and on she raged.

  She stopped just a stride from the Eastern Dark, and now that she was close to him she could not help but note how striking his features were. He was something old. Older than the Faey of the southern Valley, tall and dark and intelligent. She wondered if he was the eldest of the Sages, and though she had always guessed it to be the case, she knew by looking at him that he was no brother of Pevah and that none save for the Twins of Whiteash had been true kin. They were beings bound in power and in misdeed, not in blood.

  She spat and his smile turned to a grimace. His black eyes held specks of white at their centers, glinting like faraway stars. His hair was black, shining and beautiful, like oil on a pond.

  “Do you know why Mother Ninyeva never feared you and yours?” she asked, not knowing where the words came from but feeling them as truth. “Do you know why she was willing to walk through the heart of the White Crest’s storm, which you corrupted and sent against us?”

  “I did not—”

  “Because pride has always been the greatest weakness of them all,” she said, “and you, Ray Valour, have too much of that bitter poison to be the hero you’ve convinced yourself you are.”

  His eyes widened but he was too stunned to speak.

  “That name,” he said. “How—”

  “I’m beginning to know myself,” she said. “And the power the World has given me.” She looked up above his head and he followed her, blinking and confused. He took a step back, seemingly against his will, and when she looked back down to meet his dark eyes she saw the brightness of her own reflected back. “It is writ above you,” she said. “As is your fate.”

  She reached out with one white hand and grasped at nothing, her knuckles splitting in the dryness and leaking red over her nails. Her own tether, bright and green-yellow like a gentle dawn over plains, streaked forward like a striking serpent and wrapped itself around that thread of purple-dark and red. It felt like touching death, and as Iyana pulled the knot tight she and the Eastern Dark shared an agonizing vision that made the flats, the white sands, the broken glass and the wheeling stars above fade away, to be replaced by a crushing vision of a sprawling land of half-formed shadows and pressing blackness.

  They soared over lands farther than leagues could count and screamed through jagged canyons of the sharpest stuff. Hordes of forms spilled over the crags below, seeing the fleeting birds above and screaming and roaring and giving chase from below. They saw Night Lords sitting on mountaintop thrones and Sentinels standing at attention like ornamental guards of nightmare, their red eyes full of hate and loathing for the ones they served.

  There was a peak in the distance that had carven seats of lavender and jade with molten red, and the Night Lords sitting here were kings among kings. Their eyes burned brighter than exploding stars and they locked onto Iyana and the Eastern Dark whose name was now known. Iyana tried to pull away—but this was not the Between, she realized with mounting horror. This was true. They were here, flying on the sulfurous airs of the World Apart. She found herself spiraling down, drawn in by those burning eyes that sparked like jewels below.

  And then strong hands grasped her and turned her up, and the sky above was not full of winking stars in a dark blue curtain nor clouds of vaporous fumes and winged terrors. She saw a sprawling plateau turned upside-down, with leagues of green and blue and wisps of white that looked like tiny clouds. Below them, mountains that would fit under her nails raised ridges like the lines in her hands.

  It was the World she knew, and the Sage she was tangled with flew up toward it and dragged her with him. She still felt his tether coiled up in hers, or hers in his. She thought to snap it, to break it apart and kill him as Sen had done to the intruder in the east. And the thought of the Faeykin’s last moments made her hesitate. It was her mercy that would doom the World, she thought as her mind spun into a threat of madness.

  She hit the melted sand with a gasp and shock. She felt strong arms supporting her and heard Karin’s comforting voice as he spoke to keep her calm. Her heart hammered and hurt. She was hot and cold at once, and she only realized then that she was sobbing, her cheeks wet.

  A shadow stole over her, and she tried not to care that her death was at hand but did. She looked up and Karin did as well, but the Eastern Dark was changed. In the place of the Faey-like figure was something closer to the old man that had first appeared on the rise. He looked down at her with gray eyes, and then down at his own hands. She looked above him, but she no longer touched the Between and was too tired to seek it out.

  Something about the man had changed. He was not the same as he had been before. She had done something. In his eyes she saw anger change to fear before settling for an odd mix of the two. He shook his head slowly and seemed to consider Karin and the fighters on the rise with fresh eyes. He looked like a god rendered suddenly mortal.

  “You saw it,” he said, surprising her. She had expected him to strike her down or to cast her back
into that strange and dark hell. Perhaps he still would. “You saw it,” he said again, and she realized with a swimming certainty he was asking as much as telling.

  She nodded and Karin looked between them, uncertain.

  “What have I done?” she asked, not sure who she was asking.

  The Eastern Dark whose name was Ray Valour shook his head and wrinkled his nose. He sighed, a human sound. “What you felt was right, I suppose.”

  He set to examining his hands and his form. He touched his face. He touched spaces in the air around him as if testing, and each time he came away disappointed and afraid.

  Karin helped Iyana to stand and turned her to the east, keeping his eyes on the Sage as they moved toward the rise. Iyana walked as if drunk, swaying. The tears renewed as they came upon the scene. She saw Sen with a shroud over his face and had to look away, shocked at the pain of it. She saw Ket with the stump of his hand bandaged. He was pale but he still smiled at her while Jes crouched over him like a protective sister. Perhaps she was. Iyana had never thought to ask.

  Talmir and the others who weren’t keeping eyes and arrows trained on the Eastern Dark stood around Pevah, who knelt before Ceth, the son he had watched die. The cloak of time still hung about the Sage, but it was fluid now, and its tendrils reached out like grasping threads to the other.

  There was a line above Pevah that Iyana hadn’t noticed before but now saw clear. It was bright, and not so much a tether as a beacon. She saw it even as the sun rose higher, the first curve of the red globe coming up to turn the white sands golden. She looked up and stifled a gasp as she saw the pillar of light meet an image of the roiling land of shadows she had left. She blinked and it was gone, replaced by the stars the sky’s blue began to wash away.

  “We all do the best with it,” Pevah said. He reached out and touched Ceth on the shoulder, and then he was gone, leaving nothing behind but the time he had given the man who would’ve been his son, and the life that went along with it.

  Ceth blinked at them, confused and weary. He looked before him at the place where Pevah had sat, and understanding dawned. He touched the place where moments before or after there had been a gaping hole and now was unbroken cloth and the skin beneath. He cried, falling onto his hands and burying his brow in the soft sand where the Sage had knelt.

  Iyana sighed and it felt like relief. She felt tension and looked north to see the Eastern Dark standing close, his gaze sorrowful as he watched the Landkist expel his grief.

  “You got what you wanted, Sage,” Talmir said, wiping the blood from his silver blade in the sand with a threatening scrape. His tone was matter-of-fact, as if he held no qualms about challenging one of the great powers of the World to single combat..

  “No,” the Eastern Dark said. “I did not.” He looked up into the morning sky, and Iyana felt a kinship with him she hated to feel. The desert foxes watched him but remained rooted and despondent, without the strength or will to sing their mourning songs. “Fen—” he started the Sage’s true name and then stopped. “Pevah died because he had to die.” He turned his eyes their way, and now Ceth’s met him, already drying, mind already working over what he would do. “At least he got to do it for his own reasons.”

  “You mean to continue with your hunt,” Iyana said. “To kill the other Sages.” Even without his full power, even changed as he was, she knew they could not stop him leaving, though Talmir looked poised to try.

  “You saw what’s coming,” he said, nodding toward the spot Pevah had knelt. “You saw why, even if you’ve convinced yourself you haven’t.” He shook his head. “Sight is a mighty gift, Kin of Faeyr.”

  “If the Sages must die to stop it,” Iyana said, “so must you.” And before he could speak, “You aren’t as separate from that realm as you think.”

  The Eastern Dark regarded her with suspicion that morphed into something that could have been denial or recognition. It was hard to tell.

  “You sent your Landkist out into the World to do the same thing you would condemn me for,” the Sage said, his voice taking on a bitterness she feared might turn to anger. “To kill me and all my kind and to save the World, even if you don’t know why. Spare me your young judgment. Your ignorance.”

  “Where will you go?” Karin asked, knowing the answer.

  “To Center, first. And then north and east.” He met the First Runner’s penetrating gaze. “Pray that I am not too late.”

  “And if you are?” Iyana asked. “If you’re wrong, and if the World Apart was always coming, no matter what the Sages’ collective egos have tricked themselves into believing?” She paused. “What then?”

  He seemed to consider it.

  “Lock yourself away in that Valley of yours,” he said. “Keep your last Embers close, and pray that the World sends you more. It was my plan before I saw the error of it. The evil of it. It isn’t so bad a plan.”

  “If you harm my son—”

  “Ah, yes,” the Sage cut Karin off, smiling without humor. “The great Ember hero. I’ve seen his like before. He should go back home. The Sage of Center is dead and gone. Balon Rael in his madness has declared war on the Landkist the World over. He won’t find allies stout as your Red Fox. What happens to him depends entirely on him. I’d suggest he stay out of my way so that I can accomplish the task he’s set himself on.”

  “It ends with you,” Talmir said. “No matter what, it ends with you.”

  The Eastern Dark did not flinch away from his stare. His eyes traced down and fixed on the bronze star for a space, and then switched to Iyana.

  “There is another side to those bright threads of yours,” he said. “Everything has its opposite. Now you have seen the World’s and what it brings. Take care that you don’t press too far, lest you form a beacon of your own. Lest you are marked as we have been marked.” And then he was gone like a trick of the light.

  Iyana swallowed and shivered.

  “Don’t worry,” Iyana said. “He is not as strong as he would have you believe. Not anymore.”

  Karin and Talmir exchanged glances. Ceth shook his head and knelt a while longer. Together, their strange and broken company looked out onto the flats that now shone in the morning glare. It was like an ocean of amber-gold, free from the scar of the Midnight Dunes and their strange and poison light.

  There were images caught in the glare. Iyana blinked but they did not wash away. She saw smudges and shadows, here the Sages locked in combat and there a lone and golden figure standing against a great shadow plastered across the horizon, wings unfurled and boasting before its death.

  Judging by the indrawn breaths from the others, they could see it too; a function of Pevah’s time and the gifts it left behind, images like memories that would play themselves out at dawn and dusk unto the World’s ending, which could come any day.

  They gathered Creyath and wrapped him in one of the red sashes while Talmir wrapped himself in one of the gray, hiding the tears he did not need to hide. Together with Sen and the others they had lost—young warriors whose legends would grow with the telling of what they had fought out here in the west that could never approach the truth—they moved toward the caves and their white quartz and the children who sounded like the birds that still flitted from alcove to alcove.

  Iyana wanted very much to hear them. She found herself walking beside Ceth and Martah for a while, the woman she had assumed to be his mate. She walked alongside another of the gray-sashes, and Iyana thought perhaps Ceth was not a father after all, and that the two were not joined. She looked at him and thought to smooth his hurt away as he thought of the father he had lost, but he seemed content in his pain and the love it recalled, and so she let it go.

  Her eyes took her over the yellow dunes and orange swells. She saw the foxes in the eddies, making sure their way was clear, though there were no more painted warriors or bloody Seers left to poison the place and make it deadly.

  Iyana felt something brush against her. Talmir walked on her other side and Ceth step
ped away, giving them space.

  “What have we accomplished out here?” he asked, the question direct and uncovering the guilt beneath. Talmir wanted to be blamed. She could see it on his face and in his bearing. She could see it in the way he wouldn’t look at the bundles they carried with them.

  “We burned out the corruption in the west like poison from a wound, and saved a people for it, and perhaps a future,” she said. “We brought one of the last Embers, and he slew a Night Lord who could’ve turned half the world to ash.” She nodded toward the east, much farther than they were going. “If the Eastern Dark is not the hero he thinks himself to be, we’ve given Linn and Kole the chance they’ll need to defeat him should they meet.”

  “They will,” Talmir said. He seemed mollified for now if not convinced, but he’d have to work through it on his own and in his own way.

  Iyana lost herself in her own thoughts as they drifted. She hadn’t said the one truth that niggled at the back of her mind like a parasite. The truth that said the Eastern Dark was right. That the Sages had to die, and that their coming west had doomed one of them and perhaps helped to secure their future because of it.

  As they stopped to rest that evening, Iyana did not feel much like turning to look west. She even stopped gazing eastward for a time, wondering about Linn and the rest of their wayward heroes. Instead, she looked south, imagining she could make out the northern peaks of the Valley. It didn’t feel like a prison anymore.

  She thought she wanted to go back and live, and tried to push down the thought that it was where she wanted to die, that she felt the World Apart now like a pressing weight growing heavier on the space between Worlds by the day.

  The Emberfolk had been made to endure. Endure they would. Whatever was to come, she would make sure of it.

  They reached the black shelves near dusk the following day. They were hot from the march and sucked bone-dry, but none had voices left to complain. Their lips were cracked and crusted over, their feet sore and blistered, their dispositions an odd mix of sorrow, relief, and what could only be the last vestiges of clinging awe from the things they had witnessed and done.