The Brilliant Dark

by S. M. Beiko

In the photo gallery, the first thing to show up was the original, terrible sketch Saskia had made of the Deon VR illusion, cribbed from the lore book lying around the apartment and Phae and Barton’s descriptions. “This is the fox warrior, Deon. Roan could change into her, because she had the Calamity Stone. Did you know that?”

  Baskar looked from Saskia, to the screen, back and forth. “Roan is Deon now, though. Because she has the Opal.”

  Saskia sighed. “It’s not the same.” Nothing was. She swiped through some of the 3D models, and the next thing that came up was a photo of Saskia and Ella.

  “Who is that?” Baskar pointed, finger hovering over the screen, then tapping it experimentally. Saskia brushed it away.

  “She is someone you love,” Baskar said. “I may have been dead a long while, but I remember that look.”

  Saskia bit her tongue with some surprise. Being surrounded by these weird, puppet-bodied shades, she’d completely forgotten that they’d been alive once.

  “You said you didn’t remember much of your life,” Saskia recalled.

  Baskar took the tablet, bringing it closer to their face, and ultimately bonking it against the wooden mask for bringing it a tad too close. “I remember love. I remember it was a bit difficult, finding any for myself when I did not ascribe to any available gender.” Baskar dipped their head at Saskia, giving the tablet back. “Would it be different for me now, in your Uplands?”

  Saskia hadn’t been expecting that question. “People fear what they don’t understand,” she answered. Baskar lifted a shoulder, then swiped across the screen to another picture. A picture of a picture, really. The original had been ripped in half and thrown in the trash, but Saskia pulled it out, carefully taped it up, and taken a digital photo to make sure it couldn’t get lost again.

  “That’s him,” she said, coming back around to Baskar’s first question. “Barton Allen.”

  In the picture were her and Barton. She had a medal around her neck from the track meet. This was the year Barton went to the Old Leg, thinking he was helping, and hadn’t come home. But before that, all of his running influence had rubbed off on Saskia, and she’d competed at school for the first time. Saskia was on Barton’s back, and Phae had her arms around him.

  Saskia shut the tablet off, remembering what Barton had said to her that same night, before she went to bed. They’d both been wired from the excitement, and in a rare moment of quiet, he’d blurted, “I told you, like, a million times about the Battle of Zabor, right?”

  She’d shrugged, half-grinning. “A hundred million, yeah.”

  “We all came together. All five of us, in that moment where we put Zabor away. It was a weird experience, invading everyone else’s thoughts, being in sort of, like, one mind. I dunno.” He was smiling to himself, trying to find the words. “We all had these little flashes, these visions. I thought I saw . . .” He glanced at Saskia, suddenly sheepish. “Well, I thought I saw a kid. My kid. And I was watching him run a track, and I was so proud of him.”

  “Him?” Saskia felt disappointment wash over her, and he saw it.

  “Wait, wait,” he said, “let me finish. What I saw was an impression. Son. Daughter. Sibling. It didn’t matter. It was that proud feeling. That feeling that, whoever that kid was, we’d built something precious together. Blood or not.”

  He’d taken Saskia’s hand then. “I felt that again today. The exact same feeling. That’s not something I could ever mistake. It was like I was fighting that giant snake, and all my friends were there, and we had done something good and beautiful. Thank you for reminding me of that, Saskia.”

  She shut her eyes and swallowed hard. Then something clumsy and slightly pointy took Saskia’s hand. She blinked in surprise to realize it was Baskar.

  “Even this far from life, the dead do not forget love,” they said. Then they leaned over Saskia, peering out for any passing Hounds, but the coast was clear. When they came back to her, their strange eyes sparkled. “Roan and Eli hadn’t forgotten, either.”

  A Prison of Memory

  No sooner had Eli shut his eyes than they were open again, and Roan was gone.

  He sat up. His stomach felt tight with the pounding need of hunger, something he could manage for a little while longer, but only just. Daylight, or the simulacrum of it, streamed through the opening in the cavern. Despite being tortured and tossed around like a ragdoll, this body was still a needful thing. He had to piss.

  As he got to his feet, he nearly buckled into the firepit. Eli edged towards the hole in the rock, catching himself on the doorway as he looked out. A steep, trodden, dirt track wound downward, closed in by familiar enormous trees and bush. He picked his way down to somewhat level ground and took a few minutes to test whether or not he could stand long enough to relieve himself. He staggered, but he managed.

  The trees behind him rustled. Eli tensed and whipped his head up, expecting to find Roan there, gawping at him like the murderous pervert she probably had become, but there was no one there. He readjusted his filthy clothes and rubbed a hand down his face.

  This was, slightly, a disaster. Though Eli’s life had been one disaster after another, this one felt scarily permanent. He thought he could just jump back into the fray and solve this how he always had — using logic. But this would be tedious work, and his patience was thin.

  He shielded his light-starved eyes from the sun filtering through towering trees, past rock. The cave was in the base of the cliffside, framed by hills. It was hidden, secure. Below was a valley, where the light caught on the surface of running water. Eli wasn’t about to wait around for Roan to come back, and with a time limit on his presence at her dwelling, he’d have to be efficient.

  He went towards the water, carefully. He still felt weak. It would take months to recover, at this rate, time neither of them had. His powers were still mostly dormant. How had Roan tapped into hers? There had to be a rudiment he could suss out. The Realms of Ancient were all about their rules. Their caveats. Their costs.

  Whatever he was experiencing, likely Roan had, too — just down on level ground, and maybe with the bonus of extra time. With Phyr gone, time was out of whack, and perhaps time down on the ground was not the same as time up in the sky. Eli didn’t want to imagine how truly long Roan had been trapped in these woods, all alone, imagining he’d abandoned her. Luckily she doesn’t remember you at all. Still, he suddenly burned with guilt. Empathy cut deeper than apathy. Maybe there was an upside to her forgetting him, after all.

  Eli whirled at the merest snap of a branch. He needed to rebuild his most basic defenses. This place was riddled with monsters, and worse, the lost dead, scattered by the cataclysm he and Roan had initiated. There were no allies here. But the Fox dead seemed to rally around Roan like she was the god they were looking for. He didn’t blame them, either.

  Eli shook his head, continued moving gingerly towards the water, through the trees.

  When he reached the brook he bent down, which hurt in every way, and drank until he fell back, gasping. If the water was cursed, he didn’t rightly care. He thought, This is the water the gods drank from. This is the place where everything began.

  It’s probably exactly where it’s all going to end.

  Eli wanted to lie down, close his eyes, and not wake up. Waste his chance. Call it off. Or leave Roan here and do it all himself. He’d already done enough to her. This could be the rest Roan deserved.

  But he got back to his feet like a shot the second he heard the drums.

  Eli fell into the first form that he’d been taught: legs spread, left foot in front of him, head and body leaning into sound. As an acolyte in the remote Rookery, he was taught to hear the wind. Not to manipulate it or harness it, right away, but to listen — it always carried some message, some lesson. He’d rolled his eyes at that. But here he heard the wind, which everyone up to this point had said had died, and the wind had brought
him the drums.

  The second form was to thank the wind and grasp the tail of it as it pulled you to the answer of the question you hadn’t realized you’d asked.

  Eli followed the sound, feeling more restored already — whether it was mad adrenaline or magic, he didn’t care. Where the wind took him wasn’t exactly the answer he was seeking, but it was, at least, a distracting spectacle.

  The drums were not loud, but persistent, and seemed to be everywhere, surround sound. Eli discovered the sound was inside him. A heartbeat. Following it with her body, beat by beat, in the clearing he’d just stumbled out of, was Roan.

  Of course it was.

  Eli was out in the open, and when she turned she’d clearly see him, but he didn’t bother hiding himself.

  She moved fluidly, with an elegance she’d never had as long as he’d known her. The Foxes had their forms, too. All the Families did. The Rabbits used hand gestures. The Seals had swimming strokes. The Deer’s forms were all metaphysical, meditative. A form was a movement of the body, a way of speaking to a First Matriarch, to channel their element into you. A Denizen asked for that power to be put to their name.

  Roan was doing something else entirely. Here, she was the flame.

  And she was dancing.

  “Isn’t it something?”

  Eli felt a mass brush against his ankle, and when he looked down, he saw a shade, gem-nose searching the air. It was a Rabbit, the size of a large hare, leaning up on its powerful hind legs.

  Eli’s jaw worked as he looked from the Rabbit to Roan. “Something. Yes.” Now Eli felt like he was intruding on whatever it was she was doing. “I should go.”

  “No, no!” the little shade twisted, then bonked itself into the back of Eli’s knees, making him step awkwardly forward. “It is a wonder to behold. It is something precious. You are meant to see, I think.”

  Now he really didn’t want to be here. “I . . . who are you?”

  The Rabbit jostled, flowing like a little patch of liquid, curious and bright. “I am Baskar,” the shade said, seeming to preen. “And you are the mistress’s new friend, aren’t you?”

  Eli sighed, folding his arms. “Uh huh. ‘New’ friend.” He turned his attention back to Roan. “And you are what, to her, exactly?”

  The large upright ears flickered. “I am her old friend.”

  Par for the course. “Right.”

  Up to this point, it had seemed like Roan was moving through repetitive motion, like a singer warming up through their scales. Now Eli felt the drums grow faster, slightly, and she shifted from stance to fluid movement, improvising.

  “What is she doing?” Eli muttered under his breath.

  Baskar shivered. “She is calling back the fire, and the fire is calling her.”

  The drums seemed to lead Roan through, her arms spiralling, her steps pulling around and through like a needle in skin. Ribbons of fire, too many to count, consumed her, twin dragons, leaping from flesh to ground and back again. She sprang. This was a very old technique, one Eli had seen when leafing through old manuscripts in the Rookery’s libraries, but no longer put into practice (not that the Families shared their training modes these days). It was a holdover from the first Denizens, those who had transformed from their animal counterparts into humans, bridging the gap.

  This was how they were going to get out of here.

  “And who taught her that?” Because, surely, it wasn’t something anyone just picked up. Not now. Not here. Not her. Roan was a lot of things but a spirit-deep practitioner wasn’t one of them.

  “The fire did!” Baskar cried joyfully.

  Suddenly the drums stopped, and Eli’s nostrils flared. Roan had her back to him, arms winged out, palms facing away from her, like she was keeping two walls from crushing her. The fire was a tide at her feet, then in a flash, it was back inside her. The Rabbit surged for her, jumping and rolling around her in what seemed like exaltation. The shade itself was strange — that Fox shades had rallied around Roan was one thing, but this lost Rabbit was something curious.

  Roan seemed to be relaxing, smiling, as she bent a hand down to the shade, which scampered off moments after, leaving the two of them alone.

  Eli tensed, thinking it best to lead with a compliment. “That was very impressive.”

  Roan’s shoulders rolled, arms dropped to her sides as she spun. “I know.”

  He bristled. “Your grandmother was a dancer. Did you know that?”

  Roan’s hands cupped her hips, head cocked. She wasn’t wearing the garnet blade. Weaponless, maybe he stood a chance against her if this went south.

  “Anyway,” Eli coughed. “I was wondering if we could get started. Or if you had any food first.”

  Her grin ricocheted off him, and Eli was mortified by how good it made him feel to see it.

  “So you crash-land in my territory, then expect a meal out of it?” she taunted. “If you can’t survive on your own, then why am I bothering?”

  Eli bit his lip hard. “Fine. I’ll leave you to your roasted ballet and go forage.”

  A rush of footsteps, and Eli only just flipped Roan off him and cleanly into the tree ahead of him, her legs dangling over the branch. She was laughing, probably at how strained his face looked.

  “Not that useless, then,” she said, smirking like an imp. She seemed much more laid-back now than she had last night, but Eli decided it was a trap.

  Back to basics. To forms. Eli slid quickly through one, a jackknife of his palm and a twist of his torso, snatching a shard of the wind and expanding it between his hands. He shot it past her head, and when she relaxed, thinking he’d missed, she yelped when the branch beneath her gave way.

  That landing was not so graceful.

  “Less useless than others,” he said, examining his fingernails.

  Roan leapt back up, and the two fell into their fighting stances. Her eyes swept over him. “You have strange gifts. Channelling air. Breaking into people’s minds.” She snorted. “If you’re not a demon, then what are you?”

  Eli’s hand was a blade before his face. Then he squared back up, and brought both his hands together, fingers splayed like wings. “I’m an Owl.” At least, he was starting to feel like one again.

  Roan eased up. “I’ve seen flying shades in the sky. Are they Owls, too?”

  Eli looked up, half expecting to catch one wheeling overhead to screech into him, but he saw only flickering leaves and the Deadland sunlight. “They are. But like the Fox shades, they are the dead. The spirits of those who have come here to rest. My shade is still inside me. For now, anyway.”

  Roan looked down herself, as if she could see her own shade through her body. “I see.” Her face wrinkled. “But I don’t see. How can we be here, amongst the dead?”

  “Oh, they haven’t been so forthright in supplying you with that information?” He shook his head. “We came through a doorway, and we took our bodies with us. Though I don’t think there’s a precedent for such a thing. Everything we do here is charting new territory.”

  She huffed, then pointed at him. “Just remember that this territory is mine. I know it better than you do. Anything you tell me could be a lie to take it from me.”

  Eli’s eyes widened. “Why would I want to take this from you? It’s not exactly luxe living. We also were never meant to stay here. We had a mission. And I’ve come to remind you of it, because we can’t finish it any way but together.”

  She readjusted her footing. Her expression closed. Then her arm lit up like it’d been elbow-deep in kerosene.

  Eli pointed, deadpan. “It’s a firearm. Get it?”

  Roan blinked. “What?”

  Eli shook his head, then kneeled before her painfully. He glanced up at her confused expression. “I can’t keep fighting you. It won’t get us any closer to where we need to be. We’ve done all this before. I know y
ou feel it, too.”

  Roan’s mouth clamped shut and she flushed. “Stop doing that, demon.”

  Eli grinned. “Nothing changes.”

  Roan’s flaming fist tightened, and he caught her about to reel back, but he held his hands up. “These strange gifts of mine. I used to be better at using them than you, but I’ve forgotten how. Just like you did.”

  “I told you to stop doing that!”

  “It was just a guess, that time.” Eli ground his teeth. “Your power is different now than it was when I first knew you. It’s raw but controlled. As close to the original manifestation of it that even I know of. The truth is I want to . . . learn from you.” The admission felt bitter, but it was, at least, true. “I want to be of use to you as well. You know I can be, whatever it is you’re looking for. Maybe we can help each other.”

  It took her a second, but Roan lowered her arm, and the flame flicked out. “Fine,” she said. “Perhaps, once, the fire wasn’t mine to command. But I was shown my way back. With the help of the shades, and the drums.”

  Eli narrowed his eyes. “Shades trained you?”

  Roan knelt before him on one knee, arm slung over it as she chewed the inside of her mouth. Eli repressed the urge to tell her she always did that, too.

  “I’m the only living thing here,” she started, looking down at the ground as she picked her words. “Aside from you, anyway. I’ve been here a long time, though I stopped counting. I feel like I’m a part of this place, but while the shades showed me the fire, and the drums led me through it, I always felt like something was . . . wrong. Something was missing.”

  Eli sat still, hands on his knees, trying to control his stupid pulse, his rising guilt for having left her here, alone, feeling so lost. “I see.”

  She shrugged. “The shades call me Deon, sometimes, which is why I feel like you’ve mistaken me someone else, for this friend of yours. Roan.”

  Eli’s nostrils flared. “There’s really no mistaking you for anyone else, but sure.”

  The girl before him was so far from the girl he’d jumped down here with. Time had definitely passed. Her hair was so much longer now than before, the same way he now had this ridiculous new beard. Her tactical skill was without loophole — anytime she let him in, it was with its own finely honed purpose. Being alone had made her strong in a way it had made Eli weak.