by Ross Lawhead
“Don’t,” Vivienne said quietly.
Freya knew the temptation of ending all her problems by her own hand; it disgusted her that Modwyn had not been stronger than she was. She had left everyone alive to fend for themselves and thrown her lot in with the dead and decaying knights in the basement.
“Why hasn’t she decayed?” Freya muttered. And for reasons she only half understood, she reached out and pulled the knife out of Modwyn’s hands and out of her chest.
Modwyn drew a breath at the same time, her eyes snapping open, her mouth gaping for air, and Freya leapt back, her hand still around the knife, which had a stone blade. Her other hand flew to her chest, over her pounding heart, as she stared at Modwyn in fear. Modwyn tilted toward her in the bed and spent a moment coughing and wiping her eyes.
“Tha-thank you,” she croaked, gradually recovering enough to speak.
Vivienne and Freya could only watch and gape, eyes as wide as saucers.
“I’m sorry, Freya.”
“Sorry for what?”
“We told you so many lies.”
IV
Daniel woke up in his cell and almost burst into tears of relief. He rose from the cold floor and brushed himself off. The hallucinations, the visions, the eternally cyclical conversation-none of it was real. He gave a prayer of thanks to anyone who might be listening and sat on the stone bench, blowing on his fingers to warm them.
But he couldn’t see his hand. At first he thought it was because it was too dark, but then he noticed a thin line of brick-red smoke that extended and moved as if it were his hand. The two lights were forgotten now as Daniel explored this new effect. He reached his other out and saw another line of red smoke spread forward. He moved them back and forth, side to side, and crossed them together. They passed through each other without the slightest resistance.
He looked down at the rest of himself and found a thicker bar of smoke that divided at the end to mark his legs. He reached forward to try to touch a leg, but there was nothing to grasp onto and he spiralled out of control, a tumbling ball of smoke.
He started to expand, the molecules in his body dissipating. He filled the small room and spilled out into the hallway. He was without form except that which was imposed on him by walls. He grew to fill the city, aware of the points of life of the yfelgopes and the rest of the Ni?ergearders within it. He thought he could feel Freya.
He spilled into the overworld and had the experience of being both fully in the dark and fully in the light at the same time. He spread across the plains, into the cities, and throughout the country. He felt life as intense points of emotion inside of him. He could feel love and hate and was profoundly moved to find how little there was of either. Corruption and rot had set into the nation, and it was in the hearts of its people who harboured it. He reached out to pry it away, but it shrank and split from him as he grew larger, spilling across the planet and breaking through the stratosphere.
As he grew in the expanse of space that lay between the planets, he felt a moment of respite. The earth and all that was in it-so confused and muddled-shrank to a nearly microscopic thing inside of him.
Was this death? Was this the end? Would he continue stretching until he was one with everything? Would he stay fully conscious, or would he just melt away into creation? He started to mourn himself and all the things that he had left undone, the people he had left behind.
And then the stars tilted in the sky and he was falling again, the exact same sensation he felt when he fell asleep.
The arcing lights whizzed and spun around Daniel, faster and faster, turning from points of light into lines and then into planes and then into solids. Curves, sheets, and ribbons rippled past his disembodied vision, unresolved equations for shapes and solids that did not yet exist. Colours drifted through and around him, unbound by form or object-pure properties with no affiliation, washing around in a conceptual soup.
Then sound entered, and he could see its effects on the properties that grew dimensions as he watched-three, four, five, six dimensions were added, and all that Daniel saw and felt joined into a whole, folding into and out of itself exponentially into a tangle of line and surface. It was as if it crystallised like a snowflake with an uncountable number of complex branches that grew and diverged and weaved in and out of each other in a mathematically precise path. The sound changed and Daniel felt heat as all the points bent inward and the curved bows they made stretched out to contain an infinite number of points and spread into membranes that were also broad to an infinite number of points, but that were nonetheless limited enough to maintain shape and design. And each of those squared infinities on every side, edge, corner, face, and border vibrated, creating a music that was the sound of every aspect of the created universe.
It was horrifyingly beautiful, and its poetry nearly destroyed Daniel. And at the point when the vibrations started to create light from the music they made, Daniel felt himself racing toward it, even as it grew to envelop him. With apprehension so great it broke the barrier of fear, he plunged into the outer edges of reality, tearing through the skeins and spirals, and into the heart of the total whole.
The inside of the absolute complexity showed windows into entire wholes of reality, separated each from the other. They whizzed past him and he saw entire completions buzz by from every angle and perspective.
He was drawn toward a certain facet of the all of everything, and after an aeon of travelling, he saw it ahead of him, glistening and humming in a tone that reminded him of his mother’s voice. He willed himself faster toward it.
As he hit the wall, every atom in his cloud of perception crashed like a cymbal, and then he was through the outer border of his own reality. He could feel that it was his, although he could, of course, not recognise it. The galaxies and star clusters spun and rotated in spinning spirals, watch-like in precision and delicacy, but built and balanced on a celestial scale. The movements traced golden paths in the darkness, and where gravity and dark matter fields harmonised, purple paths that were far below the visible spectrum appeared to Daniel’s eyes. It was through these that Daniel was pulled, navigating across aeons among the quantum particle rivers and streams that flowed through gravity tunnels.
In this way he travelled across the universe, racing along the curved intersects and spokes from one gravity bridge to another, and one spinning star system to another, toward, he hoped, home.
After countless hops and jumps that took him through a tour of wonders that would still not be seen by those on earth for millennia, he came to his own galaxy and followed the curve of its shape down to his own system, which was like entering a tiny little hovel at the end of a short cul-de-sac and then sitting in the smallest chair in the tiniest room. His whole world-everything he’d ever known-was so small and overcrowded that he didn’t know how he could possibly tolerate the feeling of being so tightly hemmed in ever again.
And as he came closer to it and to the silver string-like path that his planet followed, he saw the string start to vibrate, picking up the sympathetic notes that the moon, the sun, and the other planets created. It twisted and spun in three dimensions and created a purple gravity bridge that drew him in and rocketed him to another system in another galaxy-a larger planet with a larger sun, populated by creatures from another evolutionary tree.
Comet-like, he fell into the planet, in the thin sliver than ran across its circumference where the light side met the dark. Its movement became his, and its gravity held him completely. The sudden stop of movement was jarring and stole his breath. He had been speeding through the infinite just moments ago and here he was trapped on a tiny speck of dust.
But which speck of dust?
He looked around and was staggered by a flood of sensations: a flood of light that ushered in a wash of colour, a roar of noise, a pool of smells, a rush of tingly picks of pressure and pain all around him. All of these sensations, but nothing to concentrate or embody them. The connections seemed random and fast, one after the other: a flash
of grey-blue, a slap of cold, an ear-splitting crash, the scent of rotting leaves, a blast of heat, the rough edge of an immense rock formation.
He tried to tie together the disparate impressions, but they wouldn’t stay in place. He tried to follow one of them-the feeling of heat-concentrating solely on it, until exhaustion stole it from him. He was being stretched. He quit grasping for the heat and felt a bright green take its place.
He let the sights, sounds, feelings, smells flash through him. He was losing himself. Desperate, he clung to something of his own, not something he was experiencing, but something of his past, of him. He thought of a song his mother used to sing to him when he couldn’t sleep, the last time he truly felt safe and loved.
Robin-a-Bobbin
Let fly an arrow;
Aimed at a rabbit,
Killed him a sparrow.
Robin-a-Bobbin
Bent back his bow;
Shot at a pigeon,
But killed a crow.
Robin-a-Bobbin
Let loose another;
Over his chimney,
Striking his brother.
Robin-a-Bobbin
Taken to town,
Wearing two bracelets
And fit for a gown.
Robin-a-Bobbin
No longer singing,
Come the next morning,
He will be swinging.
The effects of this were immediate and drastic. Everything came together. The light blue joined with a cool sensation of wind blowing over him, enveloping him like a crisp bedsheet. The sound of leaves rustling against each other. And white forms, clouds, came into sharp focus. Then greys, blues, and purples-a mountain of enormous size seen at a great distance. Blades of grass as sharp and defined as knife blades.
But that was all it was-just a scene, there was no him in it. He was just a disembodied cloud of perception. He could experience and observe but so far couldn’t interact. Although relieved that he was still able to do anything, he was still terrified at his condition.
And then he got another shock when he realised where he was. He was back in Elfland. The song he’d hummed, bringing him back together, made sense now, at least. Poetry had power here.
The view was familiar-the mountain, the plain, the distant stretch of green forest-it was pretty much the same thing he had seen when he first arrived. He was standing, he presumed, on the same spot he had been transported to the first time, midway between the mountain and the forest.
He turned to look at the forest, but there was no “him” to turn. Instead, the tableau shifted to the side. Startled, he lost control of the centre of his perception and felt everything racing away from him again. He thought of the song and it all came back together-the sky, the mountain, all of it. He kept repeating the lines under his breath as he tried once again to turn.
He spun sharply and instantly, as fast as thought-completely out of control, but still coherent, at least. After the nausea had passed, he found the wood now before him, just as he remembered it, a line of trees along the horizon.
He sighed but expelled no breath. Now what? The lines of the song went around in his head (Robin-a-Bobbin let fly an arrow. .). He tried to move forward but only succeeded in making a sort of rocking motion, which he thought at first was movement, until he shifted his perception downward and saw that the grass underneath him was not going anywhere.
A thought occurred to him. He had made the landscape appear by focusing, so why not his body also? He tried to imagine his hand, imagine what it felt like to have a hand, imagined opening and closing it.
The world around him faded, dimmed, as if he were squinting his eyes. A shape appeared, like a shadow image coming into focus, and his hand coalesced out of the haze. It was like looking at some strange type of optical illusion. If he tried to leave off looking at the hand and follow his gaze down the palm, to the wrist and forearm, the whole of it evaporated, so he concentrated just on the hand, and the more he did so, the more defined it was against the now dark background.
But it was heavy, solid, like it was cast in steel. He tried to close it into a fist, but only the barest twitch of the fingers was perceptible. After a long period of exhausting thought and concentration, he could do no more than turn it. Then he was able, after a time, to tilt it downward and brush the fingertips against the grass, which he could see moved, but which gave no sensation of touch.
He gave up his thoughts of his hand and tried instead to think of his feet. This felt more successful at first, and he was able to plant two feet firmly on the ground and experienced the feeling for the first time of being anchored to his environment, but that was it. He could not, for any desire or effort of will, make them move. He tried to visualise them moving, to feel what it was like to move them up and down. Nothing.
Exhausted, he gave up and concentrated just on being. Focusing on the song, which he repeated like a mantra in his head-his lifeline to sanity.
How was he going to get out of this now? How had he come here? Was he dead? He definitely wasn’t dreaming-everything felt hyper-real. Certain emotions or moods were often heightened during dreams and nightmares, but there was never such a flood of reality, however out of joint, such as he was experiencing now.
So he was dead. But killed by what? Perhaps shot or crushed by something unseen. That was a sad thought. What would happen to everyone he’d left behind? What was he going to do now?
The world around him had come back into bright focus again, out of the dim shades that concentration on his body brought. He gazed placidly at the treeline and remembered the first time he had made the journey across the endless plain.
The more he looked at it, the larger it grew, and for a moment he thought that was because his “vision” was still clearing, but then he realised, with a thrill, that he was moving. The memory of having gone this way before was doing it.
He was flying now, the ground blurring beneath him. Although he couldn’t feel in the old, familiar sense, he was aware of a rushing wind going through him. He was starting to think of himself as a sort of cloud, a phantom.
He was going faster now, and just when he wondered how he was going to stop-if he even could stop, or if he would just fly through the woods, trunks, branches, and all-he was there at the treeline, and completely still. This is where he met Kay Marrey, the messenger from the Elves in Exile. He could almost see him standing before him. The Elves in Exile-that was a thought. Perhaps they could help him.
Then, with dawning awareness, he found that Kay was standing before him, but not as he had last seen him. Kay was draped in a blood-red robe, and his face was bone-white.
“What did I tell you not to do?” Kay asked.
Daniel made to reply but had no voice. And then the apparition was gone, leaving him puzzled and alone.
He stayed there for a time, pondering what he had just seen. Was it the ghost of Marrey that he’d summoned to him? Or was it a projection that he himself had made? Or an extension of this dream world, if it was a dream world?
Who could help him? He thought of K?yle, the woodburner, and the clearing where he had lived for several months and suddenly, with a blur of green and black, the view shifted to that same place.
The scene was very much as he remembered it, but the burning pits were unused and overgrown, being neglected for some time.
“Daniel?”
He turned, pushing against the instinct to move his body and instead concentrated on the image at his periphery.
K?yle’s wife, Pettyl, was standing in the doorway of one of the small dirt huts. She was looking at the space that Daniel occupied. Again, he tried to speak but couldn’t. Instead, he thought the words at her.
What am I doing here?
At the same moment, Pettyl also asked, “What are you doing here?”
You can see me?
Pettyl stared at Daniel a moment longer and then said, “Why have you come back?”
Back?
The memory of standing on
the cliff overlooking the elfish campsite made the scene shift again, and in an instant he was standing up there again. Except now it was in the daytime, and so slightly unfamiliar. The fantastic tents and booths were missing. Was it all still a hallucination, or could he actually be in Elfland? If it was all just in his head, then why was it so different than he remembered? Still, he clung to any small piece of evidence he might not be dead.
He saw a black form on the field below him, where the grand elfish bazaar had once stood. As he watched, it separated into three equal-sized forms and moved apart from itself. They were human-actually elfish, Daniel corrected himself-shapes. Although distant, they looked in his direction, and he had the impression they’d been expecting him.
He took a step forward and then realised with a shock that he actually had taken a step forward.
“Oh, thank God!” Daniel’s breath rushed out of him in a grateful, disbelieving breath. He dropped to his knees and spent a few moments running his hands up and down his body, feeling his face, wiping away tears of relief. He was dressed in the clothes he had been wearing back in the tunnels-his sort of modified armour and survival gear.
The black shapes approached him. He rose and started toward them as well, delighting in each step he took, but gradually becoming more fearful as they neared.
As emotionally tumultuous as the past hours had been, it paled in comparison to the tidal wave of fear he experienced as he recognised the bloodless faces. Daniel did not know the first; his bloodless face was finely chiselled and regal, even for an elf. He wore a trailing cloak that indicated an imperious dignity and funereal solemnity.
It was the other face that drew Daniel up short. Agrid Fiall, the shady financier he had assassinated in order to leave this place the first time around. His bloodless face was screwed up in a wrathful sneer, and it looked as if he would spit poison daggers if he could.
The third form was in the shape of Felix Stowe-the elf who had imprisoned Freya, and whom he had killed.
