The Colors of Magic Anthology (magic: the gathering)

by Richard Lee Byers

  We can none of us leave.

  Why not? What was he missing?

  Gwenna felt Temken press up to her, standing behind and reaching around to grasp her wrists in order to better control their movement. Eyes closed, she tried to follow his whispered directions, forgetting or placing aside all sensations but her reach for the land's mana. Forgoing sensation was not the difficulty, not for her- bayou living had made such a task easy. Only the warmth of his touch against her bare wrists offered any amount of distraction. But she couldn't visualize the bayou's life-giving side when her memories of the dank and dismal place fought against it. Even now its rotten scent clung to them, reminding Gwenna of the cold place of shadow where they had-chosen? — to live after Argoth's destruction.

  Temken stretched her right hand forward. "There, " he said, voice soft but intense, "the living force of the bayou. Growing trees, plants, animals; the never-ending cycle of life. It's Gaea's song, as you heard it, before. "

  She didn't hear it. And, if she understood his explanation, she couldn't remember ever hearing it, which could be a problem. Also she did not favor keeping her eyes closed, shutting off her best warning of the danger that the bayou could visit on them at any time. In her mind's eye, the darkness encroached upon them, drawing tighter every time they tried to call upon the magic of the land.

  "I can't touch it, " she said, resigned. Deeper within her mind, she also knew that she didn't want to touch it and shouldn't be trying. She wouldn't have been, except for the reserve of energy that Temken seemed able to tap into for them both. "It's not there. "

  "It is, " he insisted. "You've seen it once already. "

  "It's not there for me, " she said, squirming within his embrace. Still, the memory of the orchid almost made her believe until the shadow's touch fell over her and dimmed the memory again.

  Temken's grip tightened on her wrists. "It has to be, " he said. Then quieter, he observed to himself, "There must be a reason I was led to you first. "

  From Gwenna's point of view, it was she who had come to meet Temken.

  "I was sent, " she began slowly, then grew confused as if a dark shroud had suddenly been pulled across her mind. She saw no use in arguing the point. Frustrated and tired, she saw little use in continuing the exercise. "Let it go, Temken. Magic is just one more false promise. "

  "Have you forgotten Titania? The Citanul druids?" He spun her around. "Magic is a part of our lives, just as it was then. "

  Opening her eyes, Gwenna caught the expression of concern that had taken control of Temken's face. His eyes pleaded with her to believe-to try. Her gaze twitched away involuntarily, searching the darkness beyond the isolated clearing and finding the bayou's shadow looming over all the elves had built, dampening their lives.

  "It didn't help any of us, " she said listlessly.

  Eyes narrowing, the elf mage glanced back over his shoulder, following Gwenna's own gaze into the darkness.

  "Let it go," she whispered again, tired and imploring.

  "No." He didn't sound as certain of himself as before. His hazel eyes blinked their doubts. Then his voice grew stronger. "The potential exists within you and has to be the seed of your release. Try again." He guided her back around, keeping hold of her right hand, and moved up beside her, stretching his own right hand out ahead of them both. He glanced to her face and frowned. "You have to trust me, Gwenna."

  Trust did not come easily in the bayou, but Temken's touch wore away at the despondency that blanketed their lives. The darkness rallied, forcing itself in on her, but a temporary breeze through the overhead canopy rustled leaves and branches and brought to her the faint touch of nature's song. Gwenna seized upon it and nodded to Temken, uncertain and apprehensive, then closed her eyes again, reaching out. This time she felt a familiar pull, as before when Temken reached into the bayou to bring forth the orchid. He was channeling the land's mana and allowing her to feel it course through him.

  "Accept it," he whispered. "Allow Gaea's power to work through you toward the beauty of life's never ending cycle. Find in your memories the strength you remember from other lands you've passed through- other lands that touched you and you touched in return. This place has similarities to those if you look."

  Gwenna tried, and as the darkness began to glow a subtle green she fought for any memories that might banish the pervasiveness of the decaying bayou-that might banish the shadow.

  But it was not so easily dismissed.

  Despair roiled up under the surface of Temken's promise, challenging the place he had won inside Gwenna's mind. Dark energy touched her, washed over her in a stronger wave than Temken's meager offering. The shadow moved through her, never long enough to make itself completely known, but a presence nonetheless filled with raw power. Gwenna felt the clammy touch of death against her left hand, in her heart and mind, coursing through her veins, threatening to burst if she did not find some way to release it. She struggled against it, despising its basic nature but unable to throw it off. She did not want it. She had never truly wanted it, and she would do anything now to be rid of it.

  The power surged against the life-force running through Temken, overwhelming and consuming them both. It bound the two of them together, draining away strength. Gwenna opened her eyes and stared into the face of Temken as he paled and gasped for a sudden lack of breath. The elven mage jerked away, breaking his bond to Gwenna in an effort to stave off the pain invading his own body. The dark rush of power faded. The two staggered to their knees.

  "It hates," she said weakly, the vestigial memories of this attack and others remaining with her. "It needs. It will never let us go."

  Then the veil fell back into place, churning her thoughts to mask its own intrusion and leaving in place the well of sorrow and loss that Gwenna had carried with her since Argoth's ruin. Suddenly at a loss for words for what had just happened, she watched as Temken struggled to his feet. He looked at her strangely, a mixture of pity and dawning horror.

  "I know it now," he said, voice cracked and weak. Without further word or expression, he turned and walked from her, into the dark embrace of the bayou.

  Clinging muck squelched with Temken's every step in protest of his passage until the peninsula of marshy ground ended abruptly, plunging into the black and fetid waters of the bayou. A light, patchy mist roiled the surface, chill and clammy as ghostly tendrils worked their way through the seams in his trousers. Lonely cries sounded to his right, then left as a pair of mist lynxes challenged each other. A black-feathered marsh ibis glided by, then soared upward in an attempt to penetrate the thick canopy.

  Temken settled back on his haunches, shaking off the draining effect that had channeled through Gwenna. He still felt its dark touch trailing icy claws along the base of his spine, clutching at his heart, clouding his mind. It hates, she had said. It needs. A malevolent intelligence was working through her. It was keeping her-keeping them all, he was sure-imprisoned within the bayou. Something slithered up from the waters, crossing the muddy ground behind him, and paused with its sense of his body heat. Temken whispered to it a piece of Gaea's song, urging the viper along its way. Never once did he need to turn and look at it, so attuned to nature's forces around him. In this same manner the elf mage knew his adversary was not of nature and so was not truly alive. A blind spot in the preternatural sight gifted him with the wielding of the land's magic. As a worker of the forest's mana, Temken had recognized in the bayou its sources of nature's magic. He had ignored its darker aspects, a mistake that had proven near fatal today.

  No longer.

  He glanced over his shoulder and found the lights of the village cookfires, a distant and dim glow between trees and brush. Far enough, he decided, wanting no distractions. Temken swallowed against the taste of mildewed plantlife, now acutely aware of the aura of death that held the bayou in its grip, and prepared his casting. A cascade of stringy, bilious green moss blocked most of his view to the right. The living waterfall turned black and was decaying where it
met the water's scummed surface. He focused on it, drawing mana from first the bayou's living side and then from his memory of Kroog's struggling young forests and the frozen taiga north of Argive. He took it into him, feeling the suffusing glow of life and turned his focus on the hanging moss.

  It responded immediately. New color brightened central fronds and then spread outward and down. Rotted stringers reformed, growing thicker with new life until the entire cascade of vegetation was once more vibrant with Gaea's energy. Against that backdrop of nature, within the twisting strings of moss, Temken looked for Gaea to tell him the name of his adversary. The first stage to understanding a battle, was to name your opponent.

  Shadow. Simply shadow.

  Temken frowned, having expected more. Nothing could pass through the world without Gaea's knowledge, without leaving behind some kind of imprint-even a noncorporeal force. Unless Gaea, too, suffered a blinding to things not of nature. The thought unsettled Temken who believed Gaea's power absolute. Magic was derived from the living lands of the world. What was Gaea if not the essence of all things living? Bleak despair swam in his thoughts, and Gwenna's words whispered up from the depths of his mind. False promises. Lies.

  But not Gaea's lies, the shadow's!

  Its intrusive presence could be felt, almost measured in the amount of misery welling within him. Shifting his focus, Temken drew upon the mana already at his disposal to enshroud and protect him. A sublime warmth flooded his veins, giving strength and clarity of thought, driving out the despair and sorrow that for a moment had intruded. Temken cast nature's energy outward, scattering it over the landscape. In his preternatural vision, he saw pieces of the magic attach themselves to that which was living-nurturing and strengthening. The magic also attacked that which opposed it: the disease and decay inherent in the dark side of the bayou, in the plague-ridden insects and swamp rats, and in the life-draining miasma. The shadow.

  It hovered there, not ten arms' lengths off his left shoulder. The frosty mist curled up to cloak what would have been the feet and legs on a normal creature. Upward from there ran the blackness. It was not a true shadow, not the absence of direct light. Instead it was evil-foulness and corruption somehow made incarnate here in the bayou. It turned and twisted, as if swatting out the magic attacking it like an insect. It folded in upon itself, at times almost corporeal, at other moments merely an indiscernible piece of night broken off from the rest.

  Then it was gone.

  His senses charged, Temken caught the wave of surprise and loathing that rolled off the shadow before it flitted away faster than his mortal eyes-elven or not- could follow. But there was more: alarm, the hint of fear at being discovered. How many years had it been since anyone had looked upon it? How many lives had been consumed by this thing of evil? Now it stood exposed, and if it was afraid, then it could be defeated. Temken took heart from its panicked flight.

  His courage was ripped from him by the soul-rending scream that shook the bayou.

  This time it did not take the shadow's influence to cast a pallor over the elven mage. He had acted too soon, he realized. Weak from the last attack, his defenses only half-ready, he had challenged the shadow and set it loose upon the village of Survivors. It hated, and it was afraid. In nature, no beast was so terrible as when it was cornered.

  Another scream came, a solitary call of pain and anguish. Temken heard no answering challenge from the elves, no wails of sorrow or anger. There was merely a despondent silence, interrupted only by the cries of the victims. The elf rose, his jaw clenched and muscles tight. He spat against the foulness of the bayou's corruption.

  This was no way to live, domesticated prey to some unnatural force. One way or another, he would find a way to set these Survivors free to rejoin the cycle of life.

  Gwenna stood between huts in the open space that fronted the bayou's heart, rooted to the spot in a mixture of fear and black desolation. Sweat beaded on her forehead, and a caustic taste of bile burned at the back of her throat. The muted gray light filtering down through breaks in the overhead canopy dimmed as if from an early sunset. Cook fires burned low and went out, as if doused, when the shadow swept nearer. People, her people, lay in the muck or sprawled, their breath shallow and eyes vacant, as if staring into a void. They screamed only as the chill finally took them. Otherwise they bore their suffering in silence, trying not to draw attention to themselves. The elves retreated deeper within themselves in an effort to escape.

  Except for Gwenna. Untouched, she tried to make sense of the situation, but the confusion within her mind argued against any fair effort to understand.

  The sickness, the madness, the chill, the shadow; how many times had it swept their small, dying community? It came whenever someone brought forth the idea of moving on, of leaving. It brought madness among them, infecting others, until the bayou claimed its terrible price in a night of terror. Her stomach churned. So many lives, so many of Gaea's children, wasted away to nothing over the decades. How many times? Dozens, certainly, but Gwenna could only remember the first night when she had decided that the bayou's embrace must be endured. Hadn't they learned already? The law was set, and to challenge it brought only misfortune. One did not question the law or take action against it. What was the point? Better to succumb, better that you lived in ignorance. So she had led her enclave.

  Another scream tore through her mind, the shriek tapering off to a whimper. No, there was no magic. No song or savior. There was only a hand on her arm.

  Temken.

  "Where is it?" he asked, voice frantic and insistent.

  The shadow's shroud blanketed her mind, distorting the words to barely recognizable sounds. Gwenna felt silent tears slide down her cheeks. "Gone," she answered. "All gone. Destroyed."

  His bright, hazel eyes searched the gloom. "I know it's here." His grip on her arm grew tighter and more painful. "I can't hold it in place, can't beat it, without you. Gwenna, where's the Shadow?"

  It was there at the edge of her vision, teasing her with a shape she could never quite define. It reeked of the bayou, its stagnant waters and diseased animals, and decay. She shook her head and swallowed. Her throat was raw and tasted of blood. To name it invited punishment. Better to stay quiet and hope the chill would pass her by.

  "Well, I know one way of getting its attention." Temken bent forward, splaying his hands out and driving fingers down into the moist earth. Immediately an aura of deep green wrapped itself about his body.

  Gwenna remembered he had done this before, when he raised the orchid of jade and lavender from the cursed land. Now he seemed stronger, steeped in the power. This time the aura flared at once and dove down into the earth to raise the orchid instantly. In a blink it grew and flowered. Its petals swayed softly in tune to Gaea's song.

  Savior, song… and magic.

  Gwenna felt the hold over her slip a fraction as the darkness drew back to build strength and rally. The sweet perfume of the orchid drowned out the bayou's corrupt stench. Its color tinted the land around her-the wonderful green of a bright sun diffused by heavy forest leaves. She tried to flinch away. Better to live in ignorance…

  No, the song whispered; better to live.

  She turned, reaching out to Temken in support. She froze as the shadow once again revealed to her the darkest of her memories: the loss of Argoth-trees burned, the land razed, her people dying. But she did not see it with the detachment that time offers against all wounds. She remembered it as if it were happening now. She saw it, feeling the guilt of her decisions, her actions, which had cost the Argothians everything they held dear. The guilt locked up every joint in her body. Anguish froze her muscles, and despair blanketed her thoughts. The orchid began to wilt, its beauty fading once again. She didn't want this. She would do anything to be rid of it.

  This time, Temken stood ready. He reached out, slowly, the tip of his finger touching hers in the simplest of gestures. Warmth flooded her, the magic coursing through her with energy. It was enough to break the
hold once again, to give her the choice of action or withdrawal, courage or despair. She looked to the wilting orchid. Its fading sight reminded her too much of the broken promises of before and almost pulled her down with it as the darkness swept in closer to claim her. She fought against it. She did not want this.

  She would do anything she could to kill the shadow.

  In the snatch of song that haunted her, echoing within her mind from long ago, Gwenna responded to the reminder that a wilting flower was as much a cause for joy as for sadness. The cycle of life controlled everything in nature's world. Everything born of the earth returned to the earth eventually, and from death always came new life. Gwenna reached out, as Temken had tried to teach her, accepting the orchid's death as the turn of nature's wheel. From it something else could grow, and she drew upon it for herself, soaking it in as the ground drinks fresh rainwater. She allowed it to strengthen her, to give her the resolve to meet the shadow's corrupt embrace as it moved through her and was caught.

  Whispering Gaea's song, Gwenna drew the shadow into her snare. It struggled, railing at her with the cold touch of death. Gwenna felt its pains and fears. Just as despair had so many times worked to sap her will and her strength, so now the fear of the shadow worked against it, making it vulnerable. The song in her mind and in her heart grew stronger until it wrapped about them both. It lured the shadow deeper into Gaea's embrace, where it screamed inside Gwenna's mind.

  Temken brought his fingers from the earth. The heavy residue had stained them black. Not the foul black of the bayou, this time it was the rich, loamy color of fertile farmland. That, too, would fade as his magic lost its hold and the orchid died, but it was enough for now to remind him of the cycle and the cost that life sometimes demanded. He stared at his hands, at the slowly fading orchid, at anything but the figure standing just over his shoulder.

  He rose and turned in one fluid motion, meeting Gwenna's tortured gaze. Her eyes stared ahead, unblinking. A single tear of bright red blood welled at the corner of her eye and then trailed down her cheek. The gaunt-ness of her face had faded, drawn inward with the shadow's poison, leaving her with a touch of her youth in these final hours-perhaps her final moments.