by A. Attanasio
Old Ric spat over his shoulder with disdain. "The dwarves are maggots."
"This is truly a conundrum then, isn't it, gnome?" Broydo lifted a frustrated look to the high galleries, where the light filtered down through torn places and birds fretted and clicked. "Do we sacrifice others like ourselves to save all the worlds—or do we leave the Radiant One to starve and thus fail in our mission and lose all of creation?"
"Thank you, counselor, for apprising me of our situation." Ric cast him a dark look. "I am much enlightened."
"Don't act snide with me, gnome." Broydo returned his companion’s irritation with a scowl. "My concern is for the benefit of all beings."
"Then we must find a way to drive out the shadow thing in a way that benefits all beings and sacrifices none."
"I need the light of the dream..." Asofel murmured as he limped on.
The elf and the gnome exchanged apprehensive stares. "Your ideals are noble, Old Ric, but I fear we will have to be more practical if we are to survive at all."
Old Ric lifted his stubbly chin, defiant of necessity. "Then perhaps it is best we do not survive."
"What?" Broydo walked backward so that he could stare full into his comrade's fisted face. "You cannot be serious."
"No?" Ric voiced his pain, "Why should creation persist? Life devours life. Existence is an endless round of horror. Let it end. Let the nameless lady conclude her dream and end the suffering of our nightmare."
"I like not your reasoning, gnome." Broydo turned back around, rubbing his beardless jaw ruminatively. "Yes, indeed, life is suffering. That is and has ever been the foundation of existence—from birthwrack to deathwrack and all the numerous physical indignities between. And yet, gnome, and yet—"
Ric nodded with comprehension and waved one hand dismissively. "There is joy, there is pleasure, there is happiness—but all of it fleeting."
"You are bitter." Broydo placed a friendly arm across his companion's bony shoulders. "What became of the bold and daring gnome who stole the Necklace of Souls from under the snouts of the dwarves?"
Old Ric hung his head, and his cap of vines and leaves slouched over his troubled eyes. "He has witnessed the destruction of an entire clan of elves, and that has broken this gnome’s spirit."
"No, it has not!" Broydo spoke this so loudly that birds in the awning stopped fretting, and one could hear the stirring leaves. "Think with your heart for just a moment, Old Ric. Think back on your beloved daughter—Amara her name was, yes?"
"Yes," he answered in a tiny voice.
"She died in her childhood. Why did you not die then yourself?"
"Perhaps I did."
"Oh, something in your soul died, for sure. That is why you took to living alone, isn't it? And that is why the nameless lady chose you." Broydo poked a finger against Ric's chest, beside the dwarf's barbed arrow. "You were empty, and she could fill you with her will."
"Yes, yes, and so?" the gnome asked, annoyed. "What is your point, elf?"
"That we are shaped by our losses. And though this feels terrible, it is not bad in the wider scope of life." He went on more softly, "It is the way of our lives to be shaped by death."
"'Life shapes itself on the anvil of dreams—'" Ric quoted from the Gibbet Scrolls.
"'—and the hammer is death,'" Broydo concluded. "Yes, that is my point."
"Well taken, elf. Well taken." The nostrils of Ric's upturned nose widened to draw a deep breath, and then he asked, "That then justifies our murdering whole clans to fulfill our mission?"
Broydo gasped a sigh, struck again by the pain of their predicament. "I could not order it myself. But what are we to do? The survival of all the worlds requires us to be strong."
"I am not that strong," the eldern gnome admitted with a narrow shake of his head. "The mistress of this dream chose the wrong gnome. I cannot slay innocents—not even to save all the worlds."
Broydo's shoulders sagged, and the blade of the serpent sword dragged along the ground with the weight of this decision. "Aye, gnome. Nor can I. Though I recognize the necessity, like you I can see my way no further. What are we to do?"
Old Ric looked to Asofel, whose space-black eyes in his starved, skull-face stared hard at the rotted ground. "The Radiant One yet lives. We will carry on."
They proceeded in silence. Under the beards of the giant trees, they walked in the direction that Old Ric sensed until afternoon's angular light ambered.
Broydo found a covert at the groin of two boughs on a tree veiled by creeper vines. Ric foraged from a shrub of wild sugar stalks, and they gnawed on the sweet fibers while lying in the tree and watching darkness rise up the smooth pale boles.
At dawn, Asofel had gone. Old Ric, who slept out of habit not necessity, and Broydo, risen from weary slumber, blinked groggily at each other in the gray light, looking for an answer to his absence in each other.
On the ground, they found his trail. His wading gait proved easy enough to track, and they hurried through the green light to catch up with him.
"The dwarves might have found him!" Ric worried. "Why did he leave our covert in the night?"
"Food," Broydo answered, and pointed through the trees to a clearing where butterflies crisscrossed the silence of an empty village.
Ric and Broydo wandered among the grass huts looking for anyone. The entire community had vanished, leaving behind everything—garments fallen in disarray, simmering cauldrons, children's toys beside the cots where they had slept.
Asofel's tracks, visible at the far end of the village, returned to the forest. His step appeared lighter, his stride longer.
"We won't catch him," Old Ric knew. "He's stronger now. And he's going to get stronger yet."
"What will we do?" Broydo asked in a fright, turning in a slow circle to take in the ghost village.
"Take as many amulets as we can carry," Ric answered. "The villagers have no use for them now, and we will need them to book passage on an ether ship when we get to Hellsgate."
"We're going down the Wall of the World without Asofel?" Broydo shook his head fretfully. "How will we drive out the shadow thing when we find it?"
"It is a ‘him,’ a magus from the Dark Shore." Old Ric spoke as he entered the healer's hut and began collecting the necklaces of theriacal opals and headbands set with rat-star gems. "I saw him first in the torn veils of flames during my fire meditations on Nemora. And I sense him now by the power that the Lady of the Garden has granted me in this dream of hers. I don't know what we'll do when we confront him. We'll just have to do what we can."
Grumbling grouchily, the gnome packed the amulets in a twine sack and returned to the forest to continue their trek. Three more days they journeyed before the marshy woods thinned to the rocky moraine that led to the Wall of the World.
Long before the immense precipice came into view among the boulder-strewn steppes, the wind surging out of the abyss became audible, moaning like surf. Broydo removed the amulets from the twine sack and draped himself with their Charm. The calm they inspired quelled his fright when they did behold the jagged cliffs that curved along the rim of World's End for as far as they could see.
The descent went easier than they had feared. Pilgrim trails switch-backed down the steep rock face and steps had been carved by these holy wanderers at the most dangerous bends. Soon, they descended among the clouds and could see nothing. There, Broydo took the lead, using the rat-star headbands to peer through the dense fog.
Below the clouds, they emerged on a windy crag set with religious banners and whirling pinwheels. Several worshippers in elaborate tinsel windings offered ashen libations to their gods. Old Ric noted the fear in their eyes when they espied his wound, and he covered the arrow that pierced him with sheet moss that he had used as a blanket in the marsh. After that, the pilgrims ignored the elf and gnome as they passed among shrines of eroded rocks and snapping flags.
Hellsgate ranged below—a motley landscape of sulfur sands, red and green oxides, and black swirls of soot. V
olcanic mountains cluttered the horizon. Their cinder towers gusted with blue, almost invisible, flames.
"Thank the gods we don't have to cross that burning land," Broydo sang with relief. "There dwell giants. It's good indeed that we have not far to travel." He motioned down the gravel trail toward a city of scorched, squat buildings. From this religious destination, at the terminal of the Bright Shore, pilgrims began their hike to World's End, to worship their gods in the wilds above, under the direct glare of the Abiding Star.
This pilgrimage had been far more popular in pre-talismanic times, and the settlement of charred temples and dingy houses appeared dilapidated. Beggars roamed the broad streets, and the few pilgrims in their brilliant tinsel wrappings seemed garish among the filthy, rag-draped mendicants.
The sky harbor, too, appeared run-down. Many of the glass windows that had fronted the passenger station had been boarded over, and the interior stank of stale smoke from burnt offerings that smoldered in numerous alcove shrines.
Broydo gawked about at the dimly lit statuary of deities from every faith—animal gods, mortal divinities, abstract symbols—and Ric bartered their amulets for passage to Irth.
Unlike the ticket agent, most of the passengers who milled about the station were not human. A burly crew of ogres, their tiny faces stained black, had booked passage home to Sharna-Bambara after completing a work tour as miners on Hellsgate. Most of the pilgrims returning to Irth consisted of beastfolk—fox-furred people—and none paid any heed to the gnome and the elf.
The ether ship looked old where it squatted like a giant platinum toad on the cracked tarmac of the landing field. Its gray hull, dented and blotched with lime streaks, revealed where stellar debris had struck the vessel in flight. Such impacts had scratched and clouded the glass nacelles. And the sphinx's face pressed into the prow had a spalled nose and chipped wings. The friendly crew made no objection to Broydo carrying the serpent sword on board so long as he kept it secured in a compartment of his berth.
Old Ric pressed his scrawny body as deep between the crimson squabs of his seat as the lodged arrow would allow. After the juddering ascent ended and the stained surface of Hellsgate diminished to an ugly sore in the black of space, he allowed himself a deep breath of relief. "We have escaped the dwarves."
Broydo made no response. He sat enthralled by the view of space through the transparent nacelle of their berth. Stars pulsed from within cocoons of planet dust, and comets trailed long scarves of cold fire.
He had never seen such a celestial panorama, and for most of their days-long flight he sat in the window bays watching planetoids and suns drift past, all aglow inside their firework-flowers of burning gas.
Late in the flight, as Irth's blue orb gradually expanded among the star webs, Old Ric gripped Broydo's shoulder and forcibly pulled him away from the viewport where he watched their approach. "Wau!" Broydo wailed in protest at the gnome's gruff hold on him. His cry choked in his throat when he caught sight of what the gnome pointed to.
The ogres drinking mead in the sunken pit of the lounge had no shadows. They had not yet noticed and carried on boisterously with their celebration.
"He's on board!" Broydo realized, his heart slamming.
"We must alert the crew," Old Ric declared, and hurried out of the recreation suite and along the companionway that led forward.
"But how?" Broydo asked as he followed. "How could Asofel have gotten on board?"
"He is a being of light," the gnome replied. "What can't he do—if he's strong enough?"
The front of the ship stood empty. The berths, with sliding doors ajar, held no occupants. Broydo yelped at the sight of empty green garments strewn along the companionway—the collapsed uniforms of the ship's stewards.
Ric pounded on the portal to the ship's bridge, and the hatchway budged open. Inside, the control panels glimmered beneath a wraparound view-port. The cockpit indeed appeared inhabited, but only the crumpled uniforms of the vanished officers sat in the pilot's and navigator's seats.
"No one's flying the ship!" Broydo cried, looking about in panic.
From behind the open hatch, they sensed movement. Trepidatiously, they entered, suspecting the worst.
"I am flying the ship," they heard a deep voice announce. As they had feared, Asofel emerged wearing a pilot's tunic and square-toed boots of gray leather. His angular face shone like a lantern.
Old Ric held a bony hand to his face to cut the glare. "Asofel! What have you done?"
"I have taken the light of all on board save the two of you." His dark eyes appeared long and wicked with glee. "I have taken the light of the dream for myself. I am not yet strong enough to depart the dream, and so I remain in this physical form for now."
"Why have you not eaten us?" Broydo moaned.
"I need Old Ric to find the shadow thing," Asofel replied. "And I spare you, because you are his friend. I am not cruel, though you believe I am."
"Cruel?" Broydo squeaked from behind Old Ric, squinting with pain at the glowing figure. "We did not say you were cruel, though it certainly appears that you are."
"I must partake of the light of the dream to restore my strength," Asofel said simply as he turned to look out the wide view-port. "I will need all my strength to meet what awaits us there—on Irth."
Neither elf nor gnome moved. The Radiant One had a smell of morning that eased their fears to hapless resignation, and they stood motionless, watching him bend over the controls and guide them to their shared fate.
Wraith
Reece lay asleep in his hammock, dappled daylight on his slack face. The flowers that dangled from the trellis above him began to fret in a breeze. His name echoed from down a long corridor.
The afternoon light pierced a slim figure, who paused for a moment, then stepped through the arbor gate of the patio. The specter watched him with fixed stars in her dark eyes. Her sable tresses fell along a narrow body the color of air.
With a groaned curse, Reece broke the dream and thrashed awake, unwilling to face this phantom again. He rolled out of the hammock, his brown trousers and white, collarless shirt bunched with sleep wrinkles.
He did not notice immediately that Lara stood at the edge of the patio with her hood drawn back and her proud face unmarred. Afternoon light slipped through her feral features and revealed the shrubberies behind.
When Reece did notice her finally, he staggered two steps toward her, then stopped. Amazement stole his voice for a moment, and he wondered if she were a true apparition or some illusion perpetrated by his exhausted magic and weary brain.
The phantom approached, countenance gleaming with withheld tears of joy. "I embrace you in my soul, young master, for I cannot with my arms."
"Lara—is it truly you?" He held out his hand and touched emptiness. "Am I still dreaming? I held your soul in my hands—in the river—after we found your body—"
"You drowned me," she remembered with a shining smile. "But indeed, I return..."
Reece's face clouded with grief, and his searching eyes played over her happy features, finding again the traces memory had lost. "You were so horribly deformed by the murder..."
"Shh, be calm. For assuredly, I do not blame you, Reece." She extended both hands comfortingly, and they disappeared inside him. "You did what was best for me at the moment. Then Caval retrieved me. He brought me into the radiance of the Abiding Star."
"Yes," Reece acknowledged, staring into the widening dark of her expanding pupils. "An act that changed me forever. I climbed to Irth to find you. You were the beginning of my new life, Lara."
Her flat face held sorrow. "And now I fear I am herald of the end." She withdrew her hands and crossed her arms across her body forbiddingly. "Master, I've come to warn you—"
"Of the Shadow Eater." He met the surprise in her gaze with a nod. "Yes, I know. You've reached me in my dreams already. I never guessed that you would actually come for me." He beckoned her closer. "Let me look at you. You're still as beautiful as when you danc
ed for us among the trees. The Abiding Star has healed you."
"Yes." She lifted her chin for him to behold the clean line of her jaw. "I am healed within the wholeness of the Abiding Star. I confess, young master, out here, there is pain. The farther I go from the Beginning, the more I suffer. Soon I will go back, must go back. But something stays me—it is terrible what is going to happen. I must warn you."
Reece sat on the patio bench while the ghost related to him all that had happened to her since the settlers of the Snow Range hacked her soul free of her body. He wept to hear of the rapture she had abandoned in the Abiding Star and the pain she endured coming down through the cold layers of ether in the Upper Air to find him.
"Let me see your wounds," he asked.
She declined by lifting her hood. "My wounds are the amulets given me by my enemies. I show them only to those I wish to keep at a distance. Not you, young master."
"Then show me the crystal prism you won from the dwarves," he requested, and she obediently put in his hand the gem in whose cloudy core a piece of noon glowed.
Winds of light turned within the clear stone, small as the galaxies strewn across the Dark Shore. Staring into those distances, he heard the bloody cries of the damned echoing outward to the cold worlds. These were the souls that the Necklace had captured. Their compacted lives powered the crystal prism—lives shrunk to screams.
"It is an evil thing," Lara agreed. "But it was the only way I could come down from the Abiding Star."
Reece wished he could crush the prism and free the souls, let them skitter like water drops in a hot pan, flashing to nothing with one last hysterical scream. He stopped himself. This was his only connection to Lara, the one he had loved as his own child.
"It is an evil thing," the young witch repeated softly.
Reece regarded her sadly. The Abiding Star had healed the trauma of her murder but not the fact of it. She remained but a phantom, a changeless image of what had once lived—and tortured souls gave her form.
"It was Duppy Hob who made it," she continued. "Duppy Hob pulled fiends and shaitans out of the ethers of the Upper Air to do his bidding on World's End." She pressed so close to him, he could see through the peepholes of her eyes into the black crypt of her head. Small lights wormed there: reflections from the prism in his hand, the ravenous devils that wove the shape of his beloved Lara.
