She kissed him, her lips tingling with the shock, as if he was a bottled storm. She felt his hands slip beneath the folds of her shirt where she had neglected to button it, and felt her core contract as she felt the charge.
It wasn’t a hungry feeling, nor a desperate one, as they fell in a tangle in the glade, the bright flowers and whizzing lights making up the borders of the forest at night. When she was naked, she felt clothed in the warmth Ceth’s body provided. She enveloped him and he enveloped her, and she didn’t give much thought to who was pulling whom, only that neither was pushing away.
That night, in a world gone dark and soon to grow darker, they seized what control they could by letting go, and giving in.
T’Alon had been in darkness before, when he had first failed against the Eastern Dark, the enemy of his people. The enemy of the world.
He had struck out along with Uhtren of the mountains, the Sage who would come to be known as the White Crest. Together, they could have stopped the Eastern Dark, and all the doom that followed. Together, they could have ended things, put things right.
T’Alon had been a fool for thinking it.
The White Crest had betrayed him, left him on the Eastern Dark’s mountain doorstep, bleeding and afraid. Not for himself. Rane had never married. He had never fathered children. His bond was to the Emberfolk. His people were his children. He was afraid for them. He knew that the Eastern Dark had long coveted the power of the desert Landkist, and though he guessed it had something to do with the World Apart, he could not have known the extent of it.
But the Eastern Dark had not killed him. Instead, he had shown him pain. He had shown him solitude. He isolated him from the world and from his own mind until finally, mercifully, the trickster, the charlatan had come to bargain. He reached into the deepest recesses of T’Alon’s mind, preying on the fear he saw. The fear for his people. It was a wise thing to exploit, and exploit it the Eastern Dark did.
He showed T’Alon the horrors to come. He showed him the truth of the World Apart, and even the part he had played in its discovery.
That other realm was coming closer every year, the Eastern Dark feared. He was a madman, raving in the southeast. He had shut himself away from the rest of his kind because he had stumbled upon a truth that frightened him even more than the Dark Kind, the Sentinels and the Night Lords combined—powers he would commit the hypocrisy of courting to serve his own ends. The Eastern Dark believed that the Sages had to die to stop the end from coming. All of them … but for him.
T’Alon had raged against the Sage in that well of impenetrable blackness. He had wielded the fire at his core—the fire that had no true power here—and the Sage had watched until he burned himself out.
And then T’Alon had listened. He came to see the truth of what the Eastern Dark said. The Sages were bright beacons, their very auras trailing bright tethers, like hanging ropes, that were bound to the inky black coming from a void even deeper than the one T’Alon had found himself relegated to.
He saw the horror of the World Apart and the beings that made it up, just as he saw the futility of trying to stop them, though the Eastern Dark had made his long, paranoid preparations to do just that. He was right. The Sages had to die. T’Alon had always felt it, though he had made grudging allies of one and had even come close enough to calling another friend.
The Sages’ very essence was bound in sin. The original sin of the world, and one T’Alon had always believed the Landkist had been born to thwart.
He believed the Eastern Dark, on every count but for the final one.
T’Alon would help him hunt the Sages in the wider world. He would do anything in his power to bring them down, no matter their seeming virtue or grace. He would lead the Eastern Dark’s chosen, the Dark Landkist he would come to hate, to guide … and in one case, even to love. And at the end of that dark and bloody path, he would come back to the Sage who had started it all, and burn him away.
T’Alon had duped the Sage by allowing him to believe that he had him, body and soul. He remembered himself, even when he was made brighter, stronger by the dark magic from that other realm. The magic the Sage had stolen, and the very same magic he now feared. T’Alon had been changed, but he had kept the core burning, the bright nugget that made him up, the truth of what he was.
Or so he had thought.
T’Alon woke up in the same startling well of blackness he remembered from so long ago. At first, he thought he had been transported back to the time of his first meeting with the dark Sage. He panicked, believing that the whole of his journey since that day—the long century since leaving the Valley, hunting the Sages, loving Resh—had been a lie. The latest and the longest in a string of unique mental tortures the spider had dreamed up.
And then he remembered the rest. He remembered the faces of his companions. He remembered the fight in the Valley, where he had burned the Corrupted shell Uhtren had become away like ash on the wind, and where he had witnessed a girl receive his gifts, and the most powerful Ember he had yet seen in the World. More so than he.
He remembered the muggy forest and close-sheltered trees of Center, and the bold, cunning warrior who had wielded the Emerald Blade. He pictured the timber fortress that the Sage of Balon Rael had crawled out of his stone towers in the east to erect in a land not his own, just as he remembered the way the armored Sage had died.
T’Alon actually laughed when he remembered the way it had felt when the Eastern Dark came to claim him. There was a shadow on his heart, or behind it. T’Alon had assumed it a figment of his imagination—a manifestation of his accumulated guilt. He should have known a being as vain, clever and afraid as Ray Valour would have laid plans upon plans.
There were other images, too, but these were less clear. He saw a crystal palace he had seen once before, long ago. He saw the Frostfire Sage, glowing white, though a darkness hung about her that hadn’t been there before. There was a great sphere of fire, shadow and blinding cold, and then there had been darkness once more.
T’Alon stood on the black floor of the void. There was a faint glow to it, as if moonlight shone from far away. He saw his own hands, saw his body naked beneath him, all the scars in the right places.
He flexed his core and saw the glow begin in his chest before tracing the veins of his shoulders and arms, pooling with light into his waiting palms. He clenched his fist and then opened it, somewhat surprised when a small flicker started just above the lines and crags. He closed his eyes and called to it, nurtured it, made it feel safe. The flame responded, growing alongside his will.
When he opened his eyes, he held a burgeoning blaze. He smiled, knowing he had managed to secrete a bit of himself away after all. The smile didn’t last. He felt those violet eyes on him that had none of the mischief of Shadow and all of the malice.
T’Alon jutted his palm out to the side and sent a jet that illuminated the emptiness all around him. The fire formed a great, roaring tail that carved its way through the inky black, striking nothing. He pulled his burning hand back and watched the orange star fade into the distance.
“I have come to bargain.”
T’Alon wanted to laugh. He almost did.
He heard a sound behind him, his ear twitching, and spun in that direction, supporting his glowing hand with the other and sending another jet toward the spot. This one was brighter, faster and more in keeping with his usual self.
“Playing along, are we?” T’Alon spoke into the ether as the brightness from his latest attack faded away, leaving him in a small pocket lit by the flickering torchlight he still held.
“I have not come to fight, Rane.”
“You said that already.”
T’Alon frowned in annoyance when no answer came. “Show yourself. This is your prison. You’ve nothing to fear from me in here.”
Still no response, and T’Alon’s mood flashed over anger before settling
back on curiosity.
“I need your word that you will keep those flames to yourself, T’Alon.”
T’Alon chuffed and started to work up the lather to spit. He stopped, mind working. “What’s going on, Valour? Not in the mood to play? Or is it something else? What’s got into you?”
A long pause, and T’Alon nearly broke the silence with another roaring, crackling blaze, but the Sage spoke up. “Your word.”
“Granted,” T’Alon said without thinking. It was a wonder how impatient he felt, given the seeming eternity he had already spent lost in the Sage’s spell. “For now.”
He watched the blackness in front of him. He heard footsteps approaching, the tapping of leather boots of strong make. He saw a tall figure approaching out of the gloom, and his burning hand shook with the need to target him. The figure halted suddenly, nothing visible but for the purple gaze T’Alon had grown to hate.
T’Alon nearly growled as he lowered his hand and pulled the flames back. He kept the glow beneath his skin so as to see his surroundings, and the beast who approached.
The Sage stepped into the small pocket of flame lit black. The man who stood before T’Alon looked unlike any he had seen before. He recalled the Faey of the southern Valley. Though this man was taller, broader of shoulder and more square-featured, he had the same canted eyes and the same overlarge ears that stretched back behind his temples. His pale forehead was covered by silky black bangs, and his eyebrows were severe and angled, his lips small and tightly pursed.
His clothing was rich: a heavy robe that reached to his ankles. It was fastened by a silver belt and silver threads that interwove over the fabric to form the branches of a sort of tree T’Alon had never seen. He had rings on his fingers, each set with a different jewel, and all of them dark, the colors of blood and poison. There was a white bone hilt jutting up from his right hip, and T’Alon smiled at it as he looked him in the eyes.
He knew those eyes. Knew them well, even if the rest of the story had changed.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever been acquainted with your true form, Valour,” T’Alon said. “I assume this is it. Or you’re more vain than I had ever imagined.”
The Sage grimaced. “No form is a true form, T’Alon. Not to us.”
“You’re no god, Sage,” T’Alon said. “You’ve got more tricks than me, maybe more than the rest combined, but it doesn’t change much, not in the end.”
The Eastern Dark shrugged. It was a strangely human gesture. “Hear what I have to say before you decide whether or not to strike.”
T’Alon’s eyebrows rose of their own volition.
“What happened in the west, Valour?” he asked. “What happened that forced you to … take me the way you did? What has you so unsure of yourself?” He paused as he examined the Sage in closer detail. One eyelid twitched along with the lead finger on one hand. His breathing was forced calm, but T’Alon could hear his heart beating in the close, echoing confines of the void.
“Much has happened,” the Sage answered. “Some of it no doubt a cause for celebration for your kind, but much more of it decidedly not. That I can promise you.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t burn you up on the spot,” T’Alon growled. He expected the Sage to laugh at him, or else to attack him and lay him low. He expected tendrils of blackness to form in the ether and hold him in place. Anything but for the small, pitiful sigh the Sage released. A sigh that told T’Alon the man who stood before him was exactly that: a man. Physical. Solid. Mortal.
“If you strike me down,” Valour said, “the rifts cannot be closed.”
T’Alon felt his palm tensing. He smelled his own ozone as the sweat that pooled on the surface of his skin evaporated into a fine, sizzling mist. The Eastern Dark wrinkled his nose and took half a step back. Not nearly enough to be safe.
“You have my attention, Sage,” T’Alon said. “Keep it. What rifts do you speak of? Are the Dark Months upon us already?”
“Nearly so,” Valour nodded, “but that is not why I have come. Princess Elanil has done what I once intended.”
T’Alon’s mind worked over the implications. Some of it came back, and as T’Alon spoke, the rest began to rush in.
“How desperate have you made her?”
Valour swallowed. T’Alon did not know if he could sweat, but he looked as if he was about to.
“She has grown … stronger than I anticipated,” he said, as if it were some bold confession.
“You fought her,” T’Alon said as much as asked. “It didn’t go well for you.”
“Better for me than for her,” Valour said quickly. “Though it could have gone much better had I had my full abilities at my disposal.”
“Mine, you mean.”
“Mine,” Valour reiterated. “I lost them in the west. That much is true.” T’Alon wanted to stop him and make him tell him exactly how. He remembered the power of the Eastern Dark. Aside from his dark magics, his mightiest gift had been one he held close to the chest. It was a power of unmaking, or undoing, and enemies never knew it until they had struck a near-fatal blow. One that the Eastern Dark would reverse, send back.
It had made a Sage who appeared weakest among the rest the one the others feared the most. How did you kill a thing you could not strike out of fear of harming yourself?
“The Valley Landkist,” T’Alon said, his voice sounding like recognition dawning. He crinkled his brow. He remembered Kole, Linn and the Embers on the Emerald Road, and he remembered the warrior known as Baas Taldis, the one he had fought against and alongside just before the end.
“Not the ones you know,” Valour said. He looked as if he might tell him more, and his eyes glazed over for a brief moment. It was a moment long enough for T’Alon to have exploited. He could have struck him down, burned him up, and rid the world of its greatest evil.
He didn’t, and, truth be told, T’Alon didn’t know why. He was curious, he supposed. Why had the Sage come to him, and under what circumstances? T’Alon was afraid, as well. What would happen to him if he killed the one who had imprisoned him in the deepest recesses of his own mind? Most of all, he thought of all his wayward children, and he wondered if he would be wrong in killing the Sage. If, in killing him, he might bring about the doom for them he had strived for so long to avoid.
T’Alon didn’t see the Sage’s long-fingered hand stretching toward him until it met his face, fingers splayed over his nose, brow and eyes. It was shockingly cold, and T’Alon was rendered motionless as he stared through the gaps and the jewels that stuck out from the iron and stone rings. The Sage’s eyes began to glow like candles, and T’Alon saw.
“Easier this way,” the Sage said in a dreamlike tone, as if he were drunk. T’Alon saw what the Sage wanted him to see. He saw the Shadow Kings, and he knew their names. He saw the Blue Knights in their golden armor, Landkist the prince and princess had not bothered to call the last time T’Alon had been to these frozen lands. And he saw what lay beneath the shining palace, in a void tucked beneath the frozen waves and above those splashing far below.
When the Sage released him, T’Alon felt his knees go weak. He managed to keep his feet, and thought he saw a glimmer of respect in the Sage’s eyes.
“You have always been strongest of the world’s Landkist, T’Alon,” the Sage said. T’Alon waited for the insult that would surely follow it up. The qualifier. It didn’t come.
“Reyna …” T’Alon breathed, steadying himself with some effort. “Reyna has more than I ever did.”
The Sage’s brow crinkled in thought. “I thought so, at first,” he said. “Seeing what he did against Uhtren, and hearing from Shadow how he fought on the Emerald Road, and against whom.” He shook his head. “Potential. You speak of potential, Rane, for as it stands, the Sage girl, Ve’Ran, has him beat. Even the others with him have their moments. Each is special, but there is only one
Ember king.”
T’Alon thought of them. He thought of them all, but his mind turned to Kole last. He smiled. The Sage ignored him.
“We’ll see the truth of it before long, in any event,” Valour said. “I’ll deal with the other Ember when he wakes. For now—”
“What?” T’Alon interrupted. The Sage’s eyes flashed a knowing look.
“He is with us,” Valour said, his voice silky smooth. He might have come with a bargain in mind, but he had always been one to revel in any small victory he could take. “With Shadow and me.”
“And with those beasts you called in from the very pit of darkness you seek to escape,” T’Alon said. “How very like you.”
“Do not presume to judge the Shadow Kings,” he said dismissively. “Who is to say what they once were, before the Last God came and plunged their world into the darkness that would become it?”
T’Alon searched the Sage’s expression, wondering if he were speaking in jest.
“You believe it, then?”
“That the Shadow Kings are just, or were?” Valour asked, ignoring the slow shaking of T’Alon’s head. “They are proud warriors, just like any other—”
“You actually believe it. The Last God. The Titan of the World Apart.” T’Alon was almost beside himself with disbelief. He had absorbed the conversation in the blue cave, when Myriel, Alistair and their grim, misshapen company had prattled on about a figure of immeasurable power and limitless darkness.
“Not at first,” Valour said. His voice was soft. He spoke hesitantly, almost as if he couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. As if he couldn’t believe that he had joined with a company of zealots fleeing the power of a figure from a storybook. “But, Rane,” he sounded unlike himself, “it all fits.”
“How?”
“Your kind has long blamed me and mine for what we found in that bitter dark—”
“Rightly so,” T’Alon interjected, but the Sage waved him away.
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