Until young Declan here — and it was a stroke of luck, not planning, that he learned the truth. Even so, it's rare for one of us to push the matter so far. It is no
easy thing being immortal and those of us who understand that would not willingly bestow godhead on another unless there was a compelling reason to do so. Lukys tells me he was going to let you live and die in peace. But you found a fire without help from us, and discovered our secret.
Except there is no secret about who we are. We are what you will become.
By 'we' I mean those of us not of this world. There were five of us who stepped through the rift during the last King Tide. Me, Maralyce, Pellys, Lukys ... and Coryna. There were more of us, once, but only six of us inhabited the last world we called home. Tameca stayed behind when we left it. Like you, Cayal, she'd had enough. It was her time, she believed, to die. She held the rift open for us, and the last one through almost never survives. So you see, Lukys is not lying to you about that. If you anchor the rift, you'll more than likely not survive the closing of it.
The rest of the immortals who make up that silly Tarot the mortals of this world have invented are of this world, which is something we try to avoid as a rule. We haven't even been here that long. Although by your standards, at any rate, I suppose we have. So a certain mixing of the bloodlines is inevitable. It's not good that there are so many immortals here. That's part of the reason it's time to move on.
So, we're not who you think we are. We came here before there were people, before there was much of anything, really. Tides, the ham-fisted way you amateurs found to make the Crash made us cringe. You have no concept, none of you, of how to truly manipulate the stuff of life, or the patience to sit back and wait for it to happen. The game is one that requires infinite patience. To set something in motion, tweak it a little here and there, until you have a whole world that is so finely crafted, so gloriously interconnected, that every living thing on it is
interdependent on every other living creature. That's not science — it's art.
That's what it is to be God. But none of you understands that. Yet.
And your stupid power games. Tides, we watch Syrolee and her family jostling to rule some backward kingdom and it makes us want to weep — not for the power they seek, but that they are willing to settle for so little. They seize an empire and think they're kings. With a little more finesse, they could be true gods.
Like me.
But I digress. You asked about Coryna ... or Coron ... whatever you want to call her. She has many names on many worlds and on most of them she is a goddess. I don't know how long she has been alive, but I do know this much — she has been alive long enough for her to worry that she is growing old.
I'm not sure what started her worrying about it. Perhaps she thought if her beauty faded, Lukys's heart might start to wander. I can't imagine why she'd be concerned about that. There is no limit to what Lukys will do for Coryna, no length to which he is not prepared to go, no sacrifice too great, no deed so foul that he'd not perform it willingly if she commanded him.
I've witnessed many great love affairs in my time, more than a few that became legend on their worlds, but there is nothing in either the mortal world or fiction to compare with the dedication Lukys has for his lover. You need to remember that, children, because even when you think he's helping you, everything he does, every thought he has, every move he makes, is in some way connected to her.
I include my own ice-bound incarceration in that. You thought you were helping to contain me because I'm insane, I suppose. Lukys tells me that's the story he fed you all. Truth is, Lukys was more interested in what a few thousand years in the ice would do to an immortal.
My social experiments with xenophobia and monotheism had little to do with it, other than giving him a plausible excuse to co-opt you to his cause. This time, in order to gain your cooperation to channel the power he needs, he's offering Cayal a chance to die. 1 don't doubt for a moment that he intends to honour his promise, mind you. But it's not the only reason. The true reason is Coryna.
Remember that — nothing Lukys does is ever for the reason you think it is.
And that includes coming to Amyrantha. Lukys said this world would be easier to manipulate, but it was Coryna's fear of growing old that brought us to Amyrantha, not anything else we might have gained from coming here.
The last world we inhabited was nothing like this one. It was warm and vibrant and we treated it like our personal playground. We built creatures to keep us entertained — from the tiniest insects to behemoths the size of sailing ships. Not in the clumsy way you constructed the Crash, but with finesse — with the smallest of changes on the most minute level and then we let nature take its course. It was indescribably diverse and beautiful, our immortal playground, and we lived in relative peace with it and each other for a very, very long time ...
And then we grew bored. It happens ... always happens ... and we started to recall worlds before this one, and what it had been like to have creatures made in our own image to interact with ... someone other than ourselves to talk to. The veneer of paradise began to fade once we began to recall what that was like.
We started to hunger for another challenge.
We weren't really planning to move on, that I recall. We were just fidgety and bored and talking about it really, but then the Tide came in and it was going to be a King Tide and Coryna reminded us that
if we didn't move now, we'd not be able to move again until the next King Tide and that might be a thousand or a hundred thousand years away.
So we dusted off the Chaos Crystal, opened the rift, and stepped out on Amyrantha.
We brought enough creatures and vegetation with us to get things moving on this world without having to start again from scratch, and before long — at least by our definition of before long — we had a world able to sustain human life. After that we did what we always do — we let nature take its course.
I'll admit we didn't leave everything to chance. We all contributed our own seed to create our very own race of mortals made in our image, so in a way, every human on Amyrantha is descended from one of us. The spark is dim in some, but in others it burns a little brighter. I suppose that's the reason we ended up with so many of you. After the accident in Cuttlefish Bay that resulted in Syrolee, Tryan, Elyssa, and the rest of them, it became apparent that our carelessness had created a pool of potential immortals who were going to cause us problems if we didn't limit their numbers. Tides ... and then Diala started trying to make them deliberately, and things got really messy there for a while.
We thought about stopping her, but Lukys advised against it. I know Maralyce was all for it, and so was Pellys. At least until Cayal cleaved his head from his shoulders. It's not the first time he's done that, either, which is why he's such a simpleton. Each time a little less of him grows back, I fear. And if you'd bothered to ask about the consequences, Cayal, we could have told you the danger you were courting by trying to decapitate an immortal. But you didn't ask, did you? Too busy playing the noble friend and hero to stop and think about the consequences.
Tides, there is nothing worse than a well-intentioned immortal.
Anyway, after the others were made immortal and Diala started her minion-making, we worried what it would mean if we revealed the truth about the Eternal Flame — which was Engarhod's idea, I believe. He took what Lukys told him about fire making him immortal quite literally. The flame that Cayal extinguished in Glaeba started out as a remnant of the ship destroyed near Jelidia several thousand years before, I believe; the same flame that burned down the brothel in Cuttlefish Bay.
Lukys was living in Cuttlefish Bay. He was on that ship to Jelidia because of Coryna.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I was talking about how the story of the Eternal Flame got started. Cayal had his tantrum and rid us of the Flame eventually, which was a blessing to those of us who knew the truth, and that was the end of any new immortals for a while. That you are
here now, Declan, and can trace your ancestry, means Lukys is tampering again, trying to make a new immortal.
That is because of Coryna, too.
And he has Maralyce helping him, I don't doubt, even though she'd probably deny it. Her devotion to Coryna, while not as obsessive as Lukys's love, is every bit as strong. If Lukys needed Maralyce's help to make more immortals, she'd have given it, if it meant restoring Coryna.
You see, Maralyce is Coryna's twin sister.
I'll tell you something else you may not realise. Declan, you were never going to be made immortal — not because Lukys was feeling generous, but because you're male. Lukys is looking for a female body — young, beautiful and worthy of his queen. Whatever he told you, Declan, whatever web of lies Lukys wove to convince you, he never intended to make you immortal. The truth is, you were out of contention from the moment you emerged from the womb and someone announced, 'It's a boy!'.
Which brings me to Coryna again, and how she was afraid of growing old.
We'd speculated in the past — any number of times — on the possibility of transferring one's mind into a different body, and once Lukys got the idea, he started to study the practicalities of it. When he announced he thought he had the problem solved, Coryna decided she'd like to try it. I suppose it gave them something to aim for. A hobby, if you like; a puzzle that would fill their waking hours for countless eons to come ...
I know what you're thinking; I can see it in your eyes. If we're already immortal, we already have bodies that cannot be harmed. What purpose would there be in changing form? You only think that way because you are defined by the brief time you've been alive. Live for a few million years more, and then start to wonder if there is anything else to be experienced. Then you'll begin to understand the allure. Decide you'd like to spend time as a different gender — just to see what it feels like. Or perhaps experience the world as an animal. Or a creature adapted to an environment so unlike the one you are used to that your very perception of the universe is altered.
These are the thoughts that occupy immortal minds left idle for too long.
Some of us go mad.
Some of us start experimenting.
We had long speculated about transferring consciousness between bodies. In theory, it seemed plausible; the practicalities, however, were a little more problematic.
If you're going to transfer the mind from one immortal's body into another, the first problem you face is that you can't use another immortal body, even if you could find an immortal willing to surrender their own consciousness to make room for a new one. The same magical protection that prevents any harm
coming to an immortal prevents the transfer from taking place. So, even after we'd worked out how to effect the transfer, we were stuck with the significant problem of where we could transfer the consciousness.
The obvious answer to that is to use a mortal mind, but with a mortal mind comes a mortal body. We who want to live forever have no wish to surrender our lives for a few brief moments of joy in someone else's form. And we learned the hard way that there is no going back.
There was no meteor that conveniently struck Engarhod's ship near Jelidia, that only he, Lukys and the rat survived. Lukys spun that story when Engarhod regained consciousness. And being little more than a simple fisherman, the man swallowed every word of the tale — after Lukys's tampering had immolated him and destroyed the ship. If you want a measure of how gullible Engarhod and Syrolee are, they believed the story then, and have never thought to question it since.
The truth is far more simple. The Tide is strongest near the magnetic poles, although I doubt even Lukys knows why. He needed to be near the pole to attempt the transfer of Coryna's consciousness into a new, younger, body.
It was High Tide by then. He, Maralyce and Coryna had been studying and planning and fiddling with bloodlines for centuries, thinking they had everything in place to effect the transfer. Engarhod, as far as I know, wasn't chosen for any other reason than he was a competent sailor — just a man in the right place at the wrong time.
Coryna travelled on the ship as its cook, and the body they'd chosen as a replacement for her went along — quite unsuspectingly, I assume — as Lukys's mistress. Her name was Taya, if I recall it correctly. She was Lyna's sister, in case you're wondering, which is one of the reasons I always found that woman so damned attractive. Perhaps it's the idea that she could
have been Coryna that makes her so desirable. Or maybe it's just the idea of taunting Lukys with his failure ...
It doesn't really matter. Either motive serves me just as well. The irony is they chose the wrong sister, you see. The one they left behind was the one they should have taken. It was Lyna, not Taya, who had the potential to become immortal.
Lukys and Coryna had been living in and around Cuttlefish Bay for quite a while by then. They owned most of the fishing fleet working out of the harbour, including Engarhod's ship. Lukys — in typical fashion — was posing as his own father and son. He had everyone convinced he was two different people, and when he finally embarked on the trip to Jelidia to test his theories, he was able to spin some nonsense about being the reluctant eldest son, more interested in astronomy than trade. It also gave him an excuse to take the measurements he needed before attempting the transfer, without Engarhod or his crew asking too many questions.
You know what happened, of course. The whole thing ended in disaster. Lukys destroyed the ship with the amount of Tide magic he and Coryna tried to channel while extracting her consciousness from her body. Taya was one of the first to die. Engarhod survived, but his immortality made transferring Coryna's mind into his body impossible. Coryna's original body was lost in the wreck and nowhere to be found. For all I know it's still floating around the depths of the southern oceans somewhere, mindless, thoughtless and devoid of all awareness; a regenerating source of nourishment for any meat-eating fish who happens by.
Lukys was desperate when he realised what had happened, terrified that if he left it more than a few seconds, he would lose not only Coryna's body, but her consciousness as well. And then he spied it — the only
other creature who'd survived the explosion. A ship's rat, of all things. Lacking sentience, it had neither the wit nor the will to fight him. Desperate by then and with nothing left to lose, Lukys did the only thing he could think of — he rammed Coryna's fading consciousness into the rat.
Thus was Coron the Immortal Rodent born. We're not sure why the rat survived, or how it achieved immortality. It might have been one of those one-in-a- million things, or there might be some mechanism in play that we've never considered. Coryna has enough awareness to know who she should be, but neither the power nor the ability to act upon it while she remains in animal form. If she is to be rescued, it'll be one of us who saves her.
Trapped as a rodent, Coryna cannot save herself.
And I will tell you now the reason why Lukys has been making more potential immortals with Maralyce's help, and built himself a palace near the southern magnetic pole of Amyrantha. There is a King Tide coming. He may mean to keep his promise to you, Cayal, to end your sorry existence — just as he may well honour all the other promises and compromises he's been forced to make along the way to achieve his goal. But they are secondary considerations.
Lukys has a fresh young female body — a potential immortal — waiting in the wings, and he's experimented enough over time now to be reasonably certain of success. Coryna grows impatient so he's leaving nothing to chance. To draw the power required to restore his lover to a human body, he's gathering every Tide Lord he thinks he can trust to aid him in his quest. And that includes waking me — even knowing how pissed I would be that he froze me in the first place.
Lukys judges people well. I'd not lift a finger to help you die, Cayal, if that was the only reason we
were doing this. But to bring Coryna back — to see if Lukys can actually make this work. Well, for that, even I am willing to put myself out a little. And we're going
to make dammed sure we've got sufficient power this time by using the Chaos Crystal, which means we can channel the Tide magic from more than one world at a time.
We'll open a rift, sure enough, when the Tide peaks. But it won't be to give you the death you crave, Cayal.
It will be to give Coryna life.
CHAPTER 20
'Did you never ask Lukys for proof that Coron was dead?' Kinta asked Cayal some time later.
Kentravyon had wandered off somewhere, leaving the others walking along the dark beach trying to digest everything he'd told them. Declan's head was still reeling; he couldn't imagine how the other two felt. The first glimmer of sunrise was beginning to lighten the sky to the east, the air was cold and the tide was coming in. They would have to move soon or be swamped by it — an ironic analogy of the magical Tide that wasn't lost on Declan.
'Of course I asked for proof,' Cayal said. 'He showed me a dead rat.'
'And you just assumed it was Coron?'
Cayal glared at him. 'Don't take that tone with me, you inbred little prick. Why wouldn't I believe him? He's not wandered more than five feet from that wretched rat in eight thousand years. Why is it so hard to think that when he showed me its corpse and told me it was his pet and there was no sign of the live Coron, I believed he was telling the truth?'
'I'd have believed him,' Kinta said, surprising Declan by siding with Cayal. 'The question is, do we believe Kentravyon?'
'He's mad,' Cayal said.
'What he told us had a certain ring of authenticity,' Declan said. 'And it fits with what we know.'
'Well, it would, wouldn't it?' Cayal said. 'You've been alive for how long? Not quite thirty years? Yes, I
can see how that would equip you with all the knowledge you'd need to make a sound and rational judgement on the fate of the immortals. I bow to your superior knowledge, O Great and All-knowing Spymaster.'
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