“Forger Brancir,” she tried, “Matron of Silver, I know I'm not one of your followers, but I call upon you as a sister-in-arms. If you have any power to divide the realms, to reach through from the elemental side, please—I beseech you—grant me your aid. By the alliance you formed with the Maiden and the Mother, I beg for succor, for salvation from this prison of wraiths.”
Silence fell flat upon her as she finished speaking. The silver sword quivered in her hands, but she could not be sure if it was a sign or just her strength failing. She licked her dry lips and tasted brine, poison, dried blood. She would not last long.
And yet:
Nothing.
The goddesses did not hear.
Her heart clenched and her eyes stung. She lowered the blade and tried to chase away the tears by blinking. Never had she asked much of her goddess; calling upon her in battle didn't count, since such blessings served Breana as much as her followers. The other girls at the Cantorin temple had prayed for silly things—love, luck, confidence, success—but Fiora had abstained, for why should she waste her favor on such foolishness? Those were things you built for yourself. There was no need to pester the gods.
To be let down now, after her disciplined self-denial, after her active pursuit of the goddess's goals, after her striving to sway Cob and the Guardian to the Trifold's needs...
No. I can't be bitter. Even deities have their limits.
I'll get myself out of this. Somehow. I'll—
Something moved in the mist before her. A color—a light.
Squinting hard, she tried to make it out. It looked like a reddish candle-flame, and her hand tightened on the sword's hilt, for that was what wraiths were inside their fleshy cages: little sentient balls of light.
“Hoi?” she called. “Who's there?”
It came closer slowly—or else swelled in size, difficult to differentiate in the depthless mist. Either way, it grew until it looked as large as a fist, and suddenly she could discern the shadows of fingers upon it. A hand. A wrist.
A figure emerged from the mist, tall and stern-faced, dressed in rippling silvery garments and with sleek hair of the same shade. Tarnished eyes stared down at her from above a long, aquiline nose. The mouth creased slightly and she saw cracks form and smooth at its edges like living porcelain. In its hand was the big shard of reddish crystal that had illuminated its way.
“You're Muriae,” she exhaled, amazed.
“Yes,” it said in a smooth fluting voice. “I have come to fetch you.”
“You heard my call? Did you follow the sword?”
“Yes.” The silver person held out its empty hand. “Come. There is a safe place not far from here. We must exit before we draw any attention.”
“Of course,” said Fiora, and clasped the elemental's hand. “And praise be to Brancir. I knew someone had to be able to hear me in here!”
It smiled wider, glimpses of raw silver showing beneath the false flesh before the cracks resealed. “Indeed,” it said, then turned its gaze from her and led onward, into the fog.
Chapter 12 – Future and Past
Ilshenrir burst from the Grey like an arrow, reassembling himself for speed. Close above hung his fellow haelhene, already unfurled into their native forms; he barely evaded tendrils from three different phase-angles as he shot into the sky.
As expected, they gave chase.
The bonds of the world diminished as he gained altitude, and he unfurled as soon as he could do so without slowing. Immediately the probabilities arrayed ahead like a kaleidoscope of doom: the manifold deaths, subjugations and maimings that his kin had in mind for him. Each pursuer planned differently, and they jockeyed their wills against each other, trying to force the rest to conform to their preference.
They could not fold space, though—not while flying in atmosphere—so he still had options. Extending fifth-dimensional wings, he let the currents of time and potential loft him high toward where there was no sky, only the black terminus of the Seals, and below no ground but the crushing stasis of the world's disapproval. His pursuers became potentialities, ever-shifting. The universe fanned out before his gaze.
In the distance he sensed the grand arrays of Hlacaasteia, unfurled like a thousand flowering buds into the transient substreams of time. The reaching fingers and the withering ones, the cages and the open doors, the crumbling shells and the ever-rising, ever-renewing spires—all the alterations that it could make, that it might make, branching from it in self-pruning ecstatic profusion. Its emanating futures made him tremble even from afar.
He curved away, not daring to impinge upon its reach; the probability-waves it could project were far stronger than him, and if caught in their riptide he would have no chance. His haelhene kin sent out their own waves, but they clashed against each other as often as not. With five of them—no, six—in pursuit, each determined to be the one to gain the glory, they created plenty of dead space for him to exploit.
There should have been more; he had seen at least ten in the sky. But this many were already enough to handle. No matter their division, he could not force his will over all six of them. His chances spread out ahead, and he wheeled toward discordance—toward a probability where they clashed ever more while he stayed passive and rode their fore-waves through the gaps in their greed.
It was a slow game, not like the one he had played with Lycharvan at Erestoia By-The-Sea. That spire's probability-waves had been flattened by Cob's presence and scattered by the green Syllastrian crystal, giving the haelhene no strong currents to ride and himself no overwhelming foe. He had been able to fight Lycharvan on near-equal footing—his strength of will sufficient to carve his preferred future into the substance of his 'cousin'—and then to disrupt and distract, breaking the second wraith's waves with his own to banish the future where it annihilated Lark.
Here, he dared not turn on them. They would swarm him, and if none attained full dominance, the clash between their waves would tear him apart. That option hung the heaviest in his view, saturated with probability, and it took all his energy to resist its gravity—to chart a path toward a dimmer glint of hope.
His options: the Grey again, tremendously difficult to access from the air. Defiant self-detonation, either before or after they swarmed him. Continued flight, until they eventually peeled off from him or night fell to sap them all. Or descent.
Their waves tugged at him, trying to sway his choice just as they influenced each other. Some wanted a continued flight, their probabilities forecasting the others falling away and an eventual exhausted capture. Others nudged him toward a detonation that took out only their rivals—standard haelhene politics. Even if they were all from the same House, they were not the same rank; he could feel it in the unequal weight of their thrusts.
He took another turn toward discord and forced it back at them, targeting the weakest two. Immediately those began to pull against the strongest haelhene, flinging their futures forward in opposition to it, while a fourth pushed from a different angle to bend the outcome more to its benefit. The other two tried to maintain their personal trajectories by narrowing their waves.
Cooperation would have netted me before I left the ground, thought Ilshenrir clinically. Was I like that when I was haelhene?
The chaos in their waves roughened his flight, so he folded himself narrow lest they scuttle him by accident. Wingless, he could no longer project waves, but he retained just enough fletching to steer, like a glass arrow punching repeatedly through the lopsided bubbles of fate that tried to trap him.
Up, and up, and up, until the Seals loomed fierce and massive—the burning black limit of the world. No other option than to turn into the ripples, to try to ride them to escape—
And then he saw it. There, far at the edge of the chaos, an outlier glinting in a dark field of death. A pinhole so small—so constricted—that he could not see what lay beyond, only that the others' waves rebounded from the blank space around it.
Pause to think and he woul
d pass its threshold and consign it to the oblivion of unchosen paths. Ahead, the others' waves rebounded from the Seals to tear his future into prison-sized chunks. Convergence approached, swiftly, soon, now—
He chose.
The turbulence nearly snapped him as he dropped through a scatter-zone in the waves, straight down toward earth and solidity. The others, having pushed for some sort of turn and not a complete reverse, wheeled above him in confusion, probabilities in disarray as some struggled to spot him and others pressed their agendas on their rivals.
He forced his gaze down to where the pinhole glinted, feeling physical reality press tight against the dimensions he had already folded in. Less willing to restrict themselves, his pursuers lost ground, and as he fell, fell, fell, he started to lose track of them. His senses collapsed in on themselves until he could barely feel their fore-waves—could barely tell if they still tailed him or if they'd spun away, dissuaded by the darkness that rushed up ever faster.
His fifth dimension closed completely, and he opened his physical eyes to see the salt lake below. Blue-green and perfectly circular, crusted as thick as winter ice.
I am solid again, he thought. I will dash myself to pieces on it. That is why I can not see past that pinspot; I will be dead.
He had foreseen his death before, though—many times, in many different situations—and it had never been like this. Probable death showed itself like a vision, a grand reel of gravitational inevitability that could drag down an unwary seer no matter their actual chance. It was the curse of foreknowledge, the basis of all prophecy; a living mind, even a caiohene one, fixated on its demise more strongly than any other option.
Even as he thought this, he saw deaths spin out to either side of the hole, created by the wavering of his will. Faint like dreams. He scanned frantically for other possibilities, but his physical eyes could only hold so many, and all faded as the sand approached—
Ah. I understand.
It was the limit of vision. The world compacted the caiohene form, its dimensions, its senses, its essence. On the surface, they could still function, but underground...
Underground, they were blind.
He could have changed trajectory then; he was falling fast but he had no spine to damage, no innards to pulp if he made a sudden sharp turn. But dimly he felt his kin still on his tail, the waves of their intentions shimmering around him, and he did not think he could evade them again.
He closed himself tight and slipped through the pinhole, and everything shut down.
Then he hit the salt lake.
Pain—
—shock—
—shatter?
Physical sensations consumed him. He didn't understand; he never felt, not really. Temperature and texture and touch, yes, but this was a rending fire—agony?
And yet his consciousness was whole, his shell battered but unbreached.
What—
He remembered again that he had eyes, and tried to open them. Liquid pressed against their lenses, sluggish and thick, and he realized that it was water. Briny slush-filled water reacting to his descent-heated surfaces, peeling bubbles of air away from him and replacing them with frost. Above, his entry-point had already vanished; below was an endless night, squeezing him thin inside his compacting shell.
Panic rose, and he jittered within his prison, throwing pale citrine light across the constellations of ice that surrounded him. Had he trapped himself? Already the heat had dulled, his cracks filling in with minerals, and he remembered how it had felt to crystallize. To be sealed into an unwieldy matrix, motility stolen, essence denied.
So be it, he thought. Better this than to be captured. But there were other voices within him, whispering, Foolish to side with the natives. Naive to attempt restitution toward this dark abscess of a world. Insane to sacrifice self and freedom for the sake of ephemeral lives.
We should not have come here. Should not have left the forest.
Should not have left the Isle.
He had no head to shake. It was strange that pure emotional denial did not seem enough now—that he had come to rely on physical actions to convey his mood, rather than the multi-tiered resonance with which his people communicated. His thoughts clamored with the wrongness of it—a dozen voices that could have been former selves or old mentors, enemies, difficult to tell. Here in this echo-chamber of midnight, they spoke louder than they ever had.
Were they right? Was he insane?
He had experienced it often in his first decades within the forest: a keen disjunction between the way he felt, sensed, thought, and the things he was told. Vallindas had steadied him, but even that closeness was wrong. He'd felt himself slipping, weakening—being subjugated not through force but by influence. Changing.
It had been impossible to measure his alterations against the airahene, with their bright colors and flowing forms, their easy adaptation. They shifted constantly yet stayed the same, while he shifted slowly and felt more and more a stranger—an enigma to himself.
Watching humans had been a comfort. They stretched and shrank and shed their outermost layers but they didn't change, not really. Something at the core remained static despite all iteration and collapse. He hadn't known what it was—still didn't—but tried to emulate it a little. A distinct face, a gender, a bodily conformation. A physical identity.
The airahene, who put on human skins only when necessary, thought it ridiculous. His haelhene kin would find it abominable.
Did his past selves feel that way too? Had he tarnished the line?
There are no selves. There is only me. Thinking like a human is truly a sign of madness.
And useless. What did it matter now? He was lost.
Had he even saved them?
No, said a voice from the dark. They are as doomed as they would have been without you. Nothing you have done outside the Isle has mattered. You should not have run.
His essence shivered. It was not a voice he recognized.
Then he felt a tug on his shell.
Had he a throat, he might have screamed. He remembered seeing lakes like this during the trek—unnaturally perfect circles—and even then they had raised dim recollections of a time before this life. A starfall, a constellation of craters and pits with water bubbling from their centers. Old, old memories from some era between the Descent and the Seals.
He could not recall investigating, though, nor had he seen them in this life. Nevertheless, they conjured a fear in him. Worse things than wraiths dwelt in the black of the Void.
The light from his eyes could not penetrate the thick soup of saltwater, and when he felt a second tug, he pressed his essence into the opposite end of his cage, as if that miniscule distance could protect him.
But the contact became a current, pushing him sideways, and for an endless span of time he drifted helpless in its grip, salt accumulating over all surfaces to blind and stiffen him. Sometimes a few inches would scrape away and he would press his essence against the clean spot, desperate to illuminate his captor, but there was nothing to see.
Suddenly, without warning, he breached the surface.
It was not the same lake. The dimensions were the same, but the local emanations were different—less touched by Hlacaasteia—and the surroundings less ridged with salt. Above, the sky was dark, the sphere of stars turning slowly against the velvet night. He wondered how far he had floated.
The tug came again, pulling him toward shore. Another spot of contact heaved at him from behind.
Under starlight and his own faint glow, he managed to perceive them through the rime: two crystal-ridden globules festooned with narrow pseudopods, like stranded jellyfish struggling to reel in a last meal. As they nudged him completely free of the water, the subterranean paralysis melted from him, and he split his shell into limbs to drag himself further from the lake. With every clawing inch, he felt its drag lessen, and soon he had fingers again, and a face, and a mouth so that he could clench his teeth.
Strange how
that seemed to help.
He did not get far before his strength ran out. Laying there, trembling inside his overtaxed shell, he saw the salt-slimes slide back into their watery realm and wondered if the Guardian had somehow called them, or left a mark on him that identified him as a friend. Without them, he would have sunk into the depths with no hope of return.
Or perhaps they simply abhorred my presence.
He tried to muster a wry smile, but his face had ceased to move. Only morning light would revive him now, the stars too dim and distant. Still, it gave him time to think.
If the haelhene had caught his friends, he would get them back.
*****
Cob didn't know how far he had run, only that the lights no longer pursued him.
It didn't make him feel better. In fact, now that he was walking, the sensation of lurking darkness had returned tenfold.
He blamed his surroundings. The Grey was silent, but he could swear that sometimes he caught whispers or glimpsed things just out of sight, moving parallel to him. He remembered this from earlier excursions, and Ilshenrir's exhortation not to encourage them, but he'd never asked what 'they' were. He wished he had.
He was also convinced that the mist beneath him was thicker than that above—cooler, darker, more real. The first time he'd noticed, he'd crouched down to verify it, and for a moment he'd seen the ground ripple like water under ice. Fear had shot him up straight, and he hadn't dared to try again.
Now, the tepid lifeless surface beneath his bare feet felt wet.
To take his mind off of it, he'd called up the Guardian phantasms, but they had no answers. Still, having their distinct shapes arrayed around him—Erosei at his left, Vina his right, Haurah in the lead and Jeronek and Dernyel behind—gave him some grounding. They strode through the fog without being visually affected by it, allowing him to pretend that there was no mist, just blankness.
The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) Page 39
