Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle)

by Siana, Patrick

  He turned to the others who had gone silent and were watching him with expectant eyes. “Time has slipped,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Ogden.

  Elias saw something from the corner of his eye, an indistinct blur. A pressure built in his mind. He felt a minute warble in time. Rasen had taught him how to perceive the subtle field of time, how to be on guard against anomalies, and detect the presence of time magic. Elias knew what it meant. Not again, he groaned in his mind.

  He took a halting step toward his companions. “Prepare yourselves,” he said before the whiteout took him.

  Chapter 54

  The Penultimate Time Mage

  Elias found himself back on the Wandering Isle. He recognized the leaden half-light of the place, and its singular arcane aura, but he was in a part of the keep he had never been before. Rather, he amended, he was on a part of the keep he had never been before.

  He stood atop the central tower, and he wasn’t alone.

  “You don’t look surprised,” Mordum said.

  Elias studied the Darkin. His yellow-white hair, his colorless eyes, the webbing of lividity around his eyes, cheekbones, and temples. He hadn’t noticed it at first, but the Mordum he encountered at Lucerne had not been the same Mordum that he and Teah had encountered beneath the ruins of Peidra, and that had been his first mistake. The Mordum that Teah had stayed behind to stop had been far advanced along his own timestream, and had shown the signs of physical corruption from having over-used time magic.

  “Your face betrays you,” Elias said at last.

  “Ah. It is sometimes hardest to see what is in the mirror, no?”

  Elias edged toward Mordum but was careful not to step onto the platinum disk that capped the majority of the tower. It was tangled with complex spellforms, runes, and scripts, and contained powers both awesome and terrible. “Where is Rasen?”

  Mordum cocked his head. “Ah, you don’t remember. You are slipping in time.”

  Elias cursed himself. He was utterly out of context, and he had just let Mordum know it.

  “I have defeated the time mage,” Mordum continued. “I am the master of this place now. I have drawn you here.” Mordum spread his arms. “Welcome home, Elias.”

  Elias reached for his sword only to find it gone. He looked up at Mordum.

  “You won’t be needing that. Not anymore. You will be here for quite some time, I am afraid, with no one to fight. No one to love.”

  Elias grew still as he realized Mordum’s plan. “You cannot bind me to this place.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Elias raised his hands, preparing to shield himself from an incinerating attack. Such an attack, however, did not come. Instead Elias felt an invisible force gather him in a vice-like grip. He struggled against it but his arms were useless and easily pinned.

  His heart leapt into his throat as he felt himself pulled off the ground to hover a foot above the tower. He reached for his power in a wild attempt to dispel Mordum’s magic, but he felt blunted, unable to channel his innate gift. Panic-stricken, and despite the fire of all his will, Elias found himself pulled through the air and across the boundaries of the intricate web of spellforms.

  “I am the master of this place now,” Mordum said. “Your power is quite beyond you.”

  Elias felt a scream gather in his belly but he refused to succumb to his urge to cry out. He didn’t want Mordum to see him rattled, even at the end. Especially at the end. His blood thundered in his ears as he glided to the center of the intersecting lines and sweeping arcs of the spellforms. He felt the pregnant power trapped there, felt it reaching for him.

  He stopped struggling. He needed to conserve his strength.

  Mordum titled his head and Elias pivoted parallel to the floor and then descended toward it. He felt the cold metal of the enchanted disk press into his back. He felt the static charge of arcane energies spring up around him, raising the hairs on his arms. Mordum crouched over him and Elias’s arms shot out, splayed open like a scarecrow’s, his palms facing the sky.

  Mordum drew a soul-knife from within his waistcoat. The black of the knife was an inky stain against the backdrop of the pewter skies. Elias gritted his teeth as the blade impaled his palm. He blinked and when he opened his eyes Mordum straddled him. Elias looked past him into the throbbing half-light in the sky, which pulsed like a heartbeat.

  A tear slid down his cheek as a second soul-knife bit into his other palm, but that lone tear was not shed for the pain. No, the tear was shed for what he had lost, not the greatest of which was his life. He had lost the opportunity to see again the light in the eyes of ones that he loved—Danica, Lar, Bryn and all the new family he had found in Peidra. Their future—perhaps all futures—had gone black. He had failed.

  Elias smelt ozone and felt the release of arcane energies as his blood met the enchanted metal of the spellform. Mordum pressed himself to his feet and stood over him. He raised his hands skyward and began to chant the spell of binding. Elias gathered what power remained to him in his chest and tried to push back against the force bearing down on him, to find a chink in Mordum’s spell.

  There was none.

  Elias’s mind worked furiously to come up with a plan. It seemed given that he couldn’t exert his own power beyond himself. His magic seemed as beyond him as when he had worn the demesnes. And then a sudden realization flashed through his mind.

  Even though he had been bound by the demesnes, his consciousness had still tunneled out of his body and into the strange dream world where he had met Danica. Similarly, when he experienced the whiteouts it was like he lost consciousness only to come to in another time or timeline altogether. If he could find a way to induce such a whiteout he might be able to escape Mordum, if momentarily. If he could defeat Mordum in the past, in his own timeline, he may be able to halt the future Mordum from trapping him on the Wandering Isle for eternity.

  Elias held his breath and plummeted into the void even as Mordum stood above him, chanting and awakening the complex spellform etched into the platinum spell-circle. He reached deeper than he had ever dared before, ignoring the burning in his lungs until he couldn’t even feel the pressure in his chest, or the trickle of blood from his ruined hands. Colors flashed in his mind’s-eye. He saw the symbol of the infinity blossom and then a white light bloomed in the dark of his mind with a high pitched, chiming tone, until it was all he could see, all he could feel.

  Elias felt himself falling, falling, falling...

  †

  Elias lurched, but there were hands to catch him.

  “What is it?” Danica asked him.

  Elias struggled to ground himself. He willed his mind to anchor, with no mean amount of effort. He was back in Lucerne, in Bryn’s chambers. It appeared as if no time had lapsed during his white out. “Mordum has tricked us. Tricked me. He’ll be back.”

  Lar drew his sword, which sent the chamber ringing as a curtain of steel was unsheathed as Ronald, Blackwell, and a Cohort of Whiteshields and Marshals followed suit.

  Bryn made her way to stand next to the Duana siblings. “But he fell into the rift,” she said.

  “I know,” Elias said, “I know. But he foresaw his defeat, somehow, or some version of himself did. That, or he survived the rift. I don’t know which, but he has trapped me in some kind of temporal loop. He’s trying to disorient me so he can defeat us this time.”

  “Maybe it’s a Mordum from another timeline,” said Ogden. “If your theory of temporal cruxes is accurate.”

  Elias turned about, scanning the room. “Perhaps.” He sensed something coming. He felt a pressure in the air, a static charge.

  “Do you smell that?” asked Eithne.

  Elias reached for his sword. The smell of ozone filled the air, like the singular, metallic scent after a thunderstorm.

  “Back from the rift!” Elias cried as a ripping sound rebounded off the walls.

  The aged and corrupted version of Mordum that he and Teah had
encountered deep below the ruins of Peidra stepped from the rift, and he wasn’t alone. A cohort of saber-wielding dark fey clad in obsidian breastplates accompanied him.

  Time distorted as the vortex widened and Elias knew the cause at once: a tear had formed at the heart of the rift, a white and ragged gash. Each time Mordum used the rift to travel from a disparate timeline, it created an independent, unstable vergence. In his heart Elias knew that if he didn’t put an end to Mordum before the next whiteout took him the hole in time would grow and swallow all he had ever known.

  Elias wasted no time putting the deluge of energy his sword had absorbed from his duel with the younger Mordum to use. He thrust his blade to the floor and cried, “Feora!” A curtain of white-blue fire ignited across the floor, walling off the grim-faced fey and his cohorts.

  Pivoting toward Teah, Elias raised his sword and with two quick taps of the blade reduced her demesnes to ash. In the time it took him to do so Mordum had circumvented his wall by stepping through the ether and reappearing on the far side of the wall, but Elias had purchased enough time to free the most powerful sorceress he had ever known.

  “You found a way to slip your consciousness through time,” said Mordum, his tone conveying the surprise his blanched and empty eyes could not. “I will confess I am impressed.”

  “Teah and I will take Mordum,” said Elias, who had no interest in engaging the fey in banter. “Sentinels, it falls to you to sort out the rest.”

  As Elias finished speaking his wall of flames came down, dispelled by Mordum’s cohorts.

  “You heard him!” cried Blackwell. “Whiteshields, Marshals, full assault formation!”

  The sizzle of magic and the clashing of steel registered in Elias’s periphery as the battle was joined, but he was already moving toward Mordum, desperate, boiling fury surging through his veins. Arcs of snaking red light lanced from Mordum’s sternum, but Teah raised a shield to deflect his dread spell. Teah and Elias locked eyes. She nodded to him and they both charged.

  As they closed on Mordum pulses of livid energy burst from him in expanding rings. Elias brandished his sword, but the whirring rings were too many for him to try to block them all, so he conjured a wall of crackling lightning to counter Mordum’s spell. After the two spells collided with a wild rain of sparks, Elias drove his conjured wall toward Mordum with the point of his sword.

  Meanwhile, Teah phased and stepped past the rings. As she rematerialized she conjured a convex disk of force and thrust it at Mordum. Mordum’s eyes narrowed and he redirected Teah’s spell to intercept Elias’s sputtering wall of lightning. The collision of Teah’s, Mordum’s, and Elias’s respective spells caused a roiling detonation that burst in all directions, but ultimately Teah’s force-disk pushed the gestalt of arcane energies toward Elias.

  Elias instinctively channeled the magic stored in his sword. He had absorbed so much of Mordum’s magic in the blade before his whiteout that it remained amply charged. He willed the pent-up energy to form a desperate shield to ward off the explosion. The shield sprang up at once, but the concussion from the explosion closed on him before the shield was fully formed. His shield collapsed under the tumult of forces, and though it did mitigate the worst of the blast, the detonation tore him from his feet and sent him tumbling toward the rift.

  He threw his arms wide, trying to halt his haphazard roll, the sound of his sword skittering across the floor to ricochet off the far wall ringing in his ears. He got his legs underneath him just as he was about to fall into the rift.

  Elias looked up, a brief sigh of relief escaping his lips. Teah had closed in on Mordum and they were engaged in a mortal struggle. Mordum’s hands were screwed into bony claws and from his blanched fingertips sputtered a tangle of black lightning. From Teah’s hands arcs of powder-blue lightning pushed against Mordum’s dread spell. Locked in the stalemate they pushed against each other, and Elias knew that whoever yielded to the other would surely die.

  Elias for one was not going to stand by to see how the duel would play out. He dashed back toward the fray as he cast his sword hand out. The runes embedded in his forearm burned as he called out to his sword through the enchantment that had bonded them together the day he had first taken it up. With nary a protest his sword whistled through the air and alighted in his open hand.

  Teah saw him coming from the corner of her eye. Drawing on the deep well of her emotions, where the heart of a mother who feared losing her child dwelt, she drained the last of her strength. With that final burst of power she constructed one last spell which she channeled not through her hands, as she had done all her life, but directly through her core. A burst of raw force tore out of her and propelled Mordum, and his tangle of black lightning, backward toward Elias.

  Mordum’s spell died. He looked down at the three feet of blue-tinged steel protruding from his chest, his blood sluicing from it in viscous ribbons. He fixed his bone-white eyes on Teah. “You cheated.”

  Teah closed on him in three deliberate steps. She ripped his soul-knife from a sheath at his waist. “Speak not to me of honor, you who stole away with my child’s soul. I would cut your throat as you slept to have her back.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” Mordum drawled. “What would the Arbiter say if they could see you now? No matter, one good turn deserves another.”

  On cue the containment field surrounding the rift sprung back up incinerating Mordum even as it catapulted Elias’s sword from his grasp. Elias, who had been pushed toward the rift and stood closest to it, alone was trapped on the interior of the barrier. He realized the significance of this at once, and his final mistake. Mordum had looked into the future and seen his own death.

  He heard the thrumming sound of the rift opening behind him. Elias turned about as time dilated, moving as if in quicksand. He was too slow.

  The soul-knife sank into Elias, sliding between two ribs, as easily as a forge-hot knife through water.

  Having foreseen his defeat, Mordum had sent a message back in time to his younger self to lay one final trap for Elias. The entire battle had been staged, and Elias like a wayward pawn had fallen right into his clever gambit.

  Mordum held him close, as if in an embrace, and whispered into his ear. “It is over, old friend. But fear not, I will release the others’ souls, at the end of time, after your bodies have long turned to dust. They will be free.

  “All, save you. I’m afraid you are too dangerous to be left in the timelines—any of them. You ever nettle me, for we are caught in a cycle, a temporal loop, and we fight over and over again for all eternity, and I can bear it no longer. You were right about the parallel timelines. I did not see it. Yet it matters not. It is too late. The gate you unknowingly created is no longer a mere doorway, for an actual tear in space and time has formed at the heart of the rift.

  You and I Wayfarer have bent space and time around ourselves and the timestream cannot tolerate two such paradoxes. One of us must be erased from the equation. I will cast the soul-knife into the tear in time. You will be erased from the future. You will cease to be as of this moment. For this I am sorry, but there is no other way. I alone will remember you. Now, go to sleep. Suffer no more.”

  Elias felt his awareness shake loose from behind his eyes and bleed down through his body, toward the soul-knife. He went blind in a way, for the physical details of the room disappeared. He saw not walls and floors and windows, but a fine network of energy: a thousand fine threads each composed of a thousand, thousand pinpricks of light. He saw Danica and the others, and saw that they had prevailed in their skirmish, if a little worse for the wear, but he saw only their auras and not their corporeal forms.

  Elias felt himself drawn toward the cold bite of the obsidian knife. He reached out with the long fingers of his will and pulled on the vast web of interconnected energies. They gathered around him, gathered around the cold knife. He drew on the energy of the tapestry and bent it to his will.

  Elias blinked and found his usual senses restored. “It’s not tim
e for me to sleep—not yet.”

  Mordum pulled back, but he held the soul-knife fast in Elias’s chest. “It cannot be,” he breathed, wonder and horror dancing in equal measure in his icicle-blue eyes.

  “Do you not believe your own eyes, penultimate of time mages?”

  Mordum’s eyes narrowed. “I am not the penultimate time mage. I am the ultimate time mage—I am the last of us. I have seen it.”

  “Is that a fact?” asked Elias. “For I have seen something else.”

  Mordum recoiled from him and pulled the soul-knife from Elias’s side. He drew back to plunge it in again, this time into Elias’s heart. The Marshal caught his wrist with a sigh as he felt his blood spill out of his wound and stream down his ribcage in hot rivulets.

  Mordum summoned his power and with arcane force bore down on his nemesis. Elias broke his concentration to gather his own magic. The knife slipped closer. Elias wove the raw force of his magic into bands of force which he tied around his spurting wound to staunch the bleeding. He felt the cold tip of the soul-knife press against his sternum.

  Elias redirected his power with a single thought and pushed back against Mordum’s arm, against his will. The fey looked at him with wild, unbelieving eyes as Elias pushed the dagger back.

  “No, no, no, no,” Mordum said as Elias bent his wrist back until the knife pointed at the ceiling.

  With inexorable and fluid strength Elias pushed the soul-knife toward Mordum, hair’s-breadth by hair’s-breadth. Mordum crumpled beneath Elias’s power and sank to the floor, utterly spent. “Do it then,” he said, his tone flat, void of fear, or anger, or woe. “It must be one of us. It is the only way.” He dropped his arm to his side and closed his eyes.

  “Not the only way.”

  Elias pressed the soul-knife flat against Mordum’s sternum. He still felt rattled loose from his usual state of consciousness, and the intricate strands of the tapestry still phased in and out of his perception. He saw the starburst of Mordum’s magic flickering deep within him, in a place below his sternum, but also in a place between worlds, in the subtle energies that flowed in and around his physical body. He reached out to the pale star of Mordum’s power and drew it toward him, toward the soul-knife. Mordum’s mouth gaped open and a banshee’s wail poured from him.