Shadow Moon

by Chris Claremont

  “Then you would cease to be,” Elora noted simply. “For what would sustain your fire, once there’s nothing more to burn? If even the hope of life is gone, where then the promise of rebirth?”

  As she spoke she held out her hand once more and to his shame Thorn found he hadn’t the strength left to hold her back. She passed the boundary of the wards as though they weren’t there, without disrupting the matrix in the slightest. The barest tip of her finger touched the nearest firedrake, stroking its back as it slipped past the way she might a cat, and it arched with a rapture of its own at the attention.

  Another twisted knotlike and came straight for her, diving into the child’s body as if flesh itself were no barrier between them. Thorn’s heart near to stopped as he believed he was witnessing in her what he’d seen destroy the tree earlier. Worse, by passing through her, it circumvented the wards as well, which meant the rest of them were likewise condemned.

  Elora began to glow from within as the firedrake slid beneath her skin as it did beneath the earth. The child swayed in time to a music Thorn couldn’t hear, suddenly possessed of a boneless grace that had to come from the creature within. Her hair radiated out from her skull, as though she were moving underwater, to burst alight, separate strands of flame that miraculously burned without consuming. Only Elora’s smile, the one he remembered from when they’d first met, kept Thorn from a reaction that would have destroyed them all. She was silver before; she’d become the essence of sungold, flush with the majesty of the dawn. When she looked at him, there were no more whites to her eyes; all he saw were cobalt pools against a background of flame.

  She held her hand before her, as if seeing it for the first time. Fist clenched, then released; in its hollow was a tiny shape with wings, and Thorn felt an awe that hadn’t touched him since the birth of his first child.

  Now his hands moved forth with a will of their own, forming a cup beside Elora’s, unspoken invitation for the tiny fire eagle to step from her to him. And so it did, clawed feet leaving sizzle marks on his flesh with every step, as though to make plain a difference between him and Elora.

  He looked into the creature’s eyes. Somehow, that wasn’t hard; though the little thing could be enclosed within the globe of his hands, its head smaller than his thumbnail, when he raised it up before him, the sight of it seemed to fill the field of his vision. One eye was sorrow, the other joy, both brought forth their share of tears. He held his father’s hand at the moment of his death, and his son’s the moment after birth. His nostrils filled with the scent of wildflowers, the bouquet he’d made for his wife when they met on Courting Day; and tasted the acrid tang of ozone and sulfur that reeked in Bavmorda’s sanctum. He felt an ache that swept out from his heart with such force that he thought it had broken and this was the final moment of being before the Dark claimed him, for all that had been won and lost before, and what remained to be.

  He blinked, because the bird was no longer where it was; it had slid back to stare at him from Elora’s eyes, and bid sad, smiling farewell with her lips, its crest encompassing her head to give it a gravitas and maturity that no span of human years could equal.

  It had touched him, but been one with her.

  He stood in darkness, and thought he’d gone blind.

  Elora stood before him, lambent silver in the night, which thankfully proved his fears wrong, but brought forth a whole new host of horrors in their turn once he realized she was stark naked. That was about all the time allowed him for that set of worries, because he took a reflexive breath to fill his lungs to bursting…

  …and dropped to all fours like a man accursed, more sick than any living being had a right to be as he found himself flooded with the stench of charred wood and ravaged earth.

  Khory held him till the spasms passed while Elora fumbled in his pouch for water. He tried to tell her that was no use, the bags’ special properties worked only for him, but the shape of the bottle on his mouth, the cool spring flow across his tongue, made crystal clear how pointless that was.

  “It went away,” Ryn said in wonderment. “The fire. Just like that.”

  “Elora?” Thorn husked.

  “I have no idea,” the girl told him. Her mouth worked, her eyes alive with a twinkling brilliance that was a fair match for the merry light in Ryn’s eyes; she gestured with her hands, using all the tools of her physical being to pound her thoughts into something she could express, only to end in a sigh of defeat. “I have no idea,” Elora said again helplessly. The words, the very concept, made her laugh. She couldn’t stop herself, she was too ridiculously happy just to be alive.

  “Makes us a pair, then,” he tried to say, to comfort her, but her laughter was infectious although his came brokenly, chortles separated by huge gasps of breath. Ryn joined in as well, although he winced almost as much, as the movements of his chest tweaked his wounds. Only Khory stayed silent, watching the three of them in puzzlement while the paroxysm of relief ran its natural course. Thorn tried to explain, but he couldn’t find space or breath to get the words out between guffaws. To his amazement, as the echoes of their laughter faded in the distance, her lips creased upward in a small smile.

  He reached out to her and, when she hesitated, unsure of what was being asked of her, took hold and pulled her into his arms, holding her close as tears flooded his cheeks. He’d laughed so hard he was crying. And not alone, either, as he felt himself and Khory gathered into Elora’s embrace. Blindly, because he knew the Wyr couldn’t rise, Thorn reached out a hand to Ryn.

  And there they stayed, a circle of life, of hope. Of victory.

  It didn’t last, it wasn’t meant to. Thorn found his spirit willing, albeit under protest, but his flesh, far weaker, and he needed Khory’s assistance to once more stand erect. He had both cloaks in hand as he rose, and held them out to Elora.

  “Actually,” Elora said in a smallish voice as she wrapped the water-and-smoke-sodden wool about her, “I wouldn’t object to those clothes you offered earlier.”

  The view from the reef was desolation, to match the bleakest soul. Only a few trunks had survived the holocaust; they stood like cenotaphs in a random scattering across a starkly barren landscape. It was a moment when Thorn wished he had no use of MageSight, and knew the others felt the same. The slopes had been seared to the bare rock, in some places layered with ash as deep as a Daikini knee. The ground was cracked and blistered, burned free of moisture down to bedrock; about their hollow it had been fused to gleaming glass, in a circle of false ice that fell away from them on every side for a score of body lengths.

  “What stopped it?” Ryn asked. They were all speaking in hushed tones, as if in a church; it seemed like sacrilege to make a sound in such a wounded place.

  “Elora did,” Thorn replied, all joy fled from him, as it had when he beheld the ruins of Tir Asleen.

  “Then I guess you really are the Sacred Princess,” Ryn said to Elora.

  In the midst of tucking shirt tails into her trousers, she gave him a look that would have made a firedrake quail.

  “I’m Elora Danan,” she said. “For what that’s worth.”

  “Tonight, gentle friend,” Ryn said with considerable charm, “it’s worth the world, at least to me.”

  “They would have done this to the whole of the world, Drumheller,” Elora said as she took in the enormity of the destruction and compared it with what might have been.

  “Outside and in.” He nodded agreement. “Cracked it to its core, burned everything they could, that’s a surety. That’s”—a reflection on his face of what the snake had told them—“their nature.”

  “Where’s the sense to that?” she demanded of him. “To utterly destroy the world you mean to conquer?”

  “Well,” Thorn considered, “they wouldn’t stop of their own accord. So either the Deceiver assumed himself capable of doing the job, or…”

  “That, my friends,” noted Ryn from where he l
ay, “is a disturbingly ominous pause.”

  “…he assumed we would.”

  “Helluva way to take the measure of your opposition, Nelwyn, an’ y’ask me.”

  “Our foe is a creature of extremes, Ryn. Mad without question, but in no way stupid.”

  “We’re not safe here, Drumheller,” Khory told them.

  A point he readily conceded. “But we can’t move till Taksemanyin’s able.”

  “Have you the strength for a healing?”

  “Each time I think not, I discover there’s more in the reservoir yet. Besides, Khory, a trek along this ridge to the top of Doumhall won’t make me any stronger.”

  “Think the Pathfinder made it?” Ryn wondered aloud, speaking the question that Elora had feared to ask.

  “Well, we formed something of a firebreak,” Thorn told him while setting out some food for the others, and the tools and medicines needed for the healing. “The blaze swept around us on both sides like a tidal wave of flame, claiming everything below this crest and as far up the south slopes of Doumhall as there was fuel to burn. If he stayed to the reef and climbed as hard as he ran—”

  “Oh!” A strangled gasp from Elora interrupted him, accompanied by a clutch of her hand on his shoulder so tight he winced and worried of a powdered bone.

  A stag stood beyond the smoothness of the fused earth. It was a magnificent beast, standing as tall at the shoulder as Khory, with better than a dozen points to each of its widespread antlers. It appeared immovable, feet planted wide apart, head bowed under what must have been some impossible weight. There was a majesty about the animal that was matched only by an indomitable will. If the forest had a king, this was truly he.

  “Stay,” Thorn told the others, but he might as well have saved his breath, because Elora took flight with that very word, as though she’d been waiting for its cue, only her trousers in place as she raced to their visitor.

  Khory held out the shirt that had been left behind. Thorn snatched it from her and strode after the girl. He knew what he would find. Elora stood so straight and still she might have been a statue, or someone who’d just felt the lash of a whip. She was crying. He wished he had tears enough left to join her.

  “I wanted to spare you this,” he said. “That’s why I told you to stay.”

  The stag’s whole body had been swept by the breath of the Devil incarnate. Not enough to kill, not quickly, not decently. It had been seared from crown to hooves, skin made raw, blackened flesh, meat fresh off a grill. There was no pain, beyond that awful, initial caress of flame, because the neural receptors had been burned away. That would quickly change as infections leached into the muscles and sinews and organs beneath. Its blood was probably already thick with poison, far beyond the ability of liver and kidneys to process. The shock would wear off, the euphoria fade, and in the madness of its pain, the animal would dash itself to death.

  As if she heard those thoughts aloud, Elora said once more, “no,” in that same, strangely still and resolute voice with which she’d addressed the firedrakes.

  “There’s nothing to be done, save put the poor thing out of its misery.”

  “You’re a sorcerer.” She rounded on him. “You’re a healer. You mean to do it for Ryn, why not for the stag?”

  Because I’m alive, he wanted to say, because I have limits. I’m tired and I’m weak and I’m not even sure I can save the one, much less both.

  But nothing emerged save a slow nod of acquiescence, because when he came right down to it, the bedrock of his being, he didn’t want to make any such choice. He wanted to save them both.

  * * *

  —

  Gray dawn, gray day, another in a series of monotonous dawns more suited to the polar realms than once-temperate Angwyn. The air had a bite to it that heralded snow, but Thorn knew even a proper sheeting of the stuff wouldn’t make this land look any less wretched. Light brought no improvement, only more evidence of how primal a catastrophe this had been.

  Thorn held out an apple slice and the stag’s broad tongue snatched it into his mouth. There was rage in the beast’s eyes as he beheld the ruin of his domain, and a resolve that boded ill for those responsible.

  Thorn sat because he had no more strength to stand, with a body held together by strings like some badly constructed puppet. If someone else did the work, he could perform a semblance of major movements—walking, for one—but initiative was beyond his grasp.

  The stag nuzzled his nose against Thorn’s ear, his ragged hairs making the Nelwyn tickle, and was rewarded with another piece of fruit. He wasn’t a pretty beast, by any standards; Thorn drew the limit at cosmetic work, preferring to let Nature herself finish that job. His coat was a frazzled patchwork of old growth and new, the skin beneath as tender and pink as a newborn’s. He’d be in a really rotten mood for the next while or so, as the regenerated nerve endings grew accustomed to their new envelope of flesh; every sensation would be amplified to the point where the brush of a branch along his flank would seem more like the lash of a barbed whip. Nothing to be done for that, especially in the wild, part and parcel of the natural process of healing. Thorn hadn’t given the stag any guarantees with his work, only a decent chance.

  Ryn wasn’t much better off. His bones were set and healing, the great wound itself closed, but he moved with an evident care that was at odds with both his normal demeanor and his physical grace.

  Thorn heard the hiss of Khory’s sword being drawn, sensed the sudden tension in his companions, but he didn’t care as closed eyes presented him with a wholly different view of the scene. Anele cocked her head, tightened her turn, to grant him a better view, and their breath seethed in unison at the sight.

  “We do appear a pathetic bunch,” he spoke aloud.

  “Leave you on your own one damn minute,” Rool groused from ahead and below him, “you just go straight to hell.”

  “You,” Franjean offered haughtily as Thorn restored vision to his own eyes, “smell.”

  “It’s been a busy night,” was the Nelwyn’s deadpan reply. “We’ve not had time for our toilet. Or breakfast, for that matter.”

  “Is that to imply some obligation on our part, hey?”

  “Perish the thought. Khory,” he called over his shoulder. “Sheathe your blade, we’re among friends.” He turned a more baleful gaze back on the brownies. “I trust.”

  “So did we.” Rool didn’t back off a step. “You left us, remember?”

  “You, as I recall, ran from me.”

  “What did you expect, with the stench of Demons about you?” Franjean took a delicate step forward, followed by a snort that would do an elephant proud. “Still there, thick as ever. Risk our souls simply by talking with you.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “See if we care.”

  “Then go!”

  There was a silence. There were some shrugs.

  “Eagles won’t let us.” This from Rool.

  “And why is that?”

  Rool cast him a sour look, a streetwise hustler before the magistrate. “They seem to feel we did you wrong. We saw you with the stag. Anele, she could see how done in you were, none of us thought you’d last through a single healing after standing up to those flaming whatchits, much less two.”

  “There were moments last night when I’d have agreed with you.”

  “Could have turned her down.” He gestured toward Elora. “Had every reason.”

  “It wasn’t a matter of reason, Rool.”

  “Yah. That’s the point, they say. You chose from your soul. If that hadn’t changed, the Demon taint didn’t matter.”

  “You disagree?”

  The brownie’s voice and manner turned deadly serious. “Drumheller,” Rool said urgently, “use your InSight, look through our eyes, with our hearts—”

  “I have.”

  “Then you see, you know! Franjean’s too kind when he says
there’s a stench of Demon on you, its nature’s tied tight to yours, as yours is to that one’s!” He jerked a thumb at Khory. “Damnedest thing, she’s as much yours in spirit as any natural child. It marks you, and not kindly. On the face of it, none of the Wee Folk will take you in, nor heed your entreaties—nor ours, for that matter, should we stay with you. Figure our reaction was extreme, you’ve seen nothing yet! Outcast and anathema, you’ve made yourself, across all the Realms. Among the Veil Folk, they’d as soon kill as look at you; that’s the way it’s ever been with Demons.”

  “They’re wrong.”

  “They won’t listen, they’ll care less.”

  “Ever stop to think,” Franjean interjected, “you and the Demon weren’t no accident? Big, empty dungeon, coulda chosen any cell, why that one, hey? Maybe the Deceiver, he pushes you down a path intended to cut you off from every natural ally?”

  “I’ve thought that.” From the very first.

  “Ever think, maybe, he plants a seed of Shadow in you—”

  “There’s a seed of Shadow in us all.”

  “Don’t talk platitudes with me, Peck, you know blessed well what I mean! Demon Shadow is different.”

  “So is this child, Franjean,” and he indicated Khory. “The Demon’s impulse didn’t come from the Deceiver, it grew from Elora. I choose to believe that what’s of me, and her, in Khory is stronger and more lasting than what’s of the Demon. I choose to have faith.”

  “Brownies!”

  “Elora Danan,” Thorn said, by way of polite introduction in answer to her outcry of delight, “may I present my sometime companions, Franjean and Rool.”