“What do you have to do with any of this?”
“I found the ruins before they did. I’ve been exploring them. I know the language. And the apparition that was in that place has done something to me. Connected me to him. Dalandaras says that it’s blood magic.”
He shrugged and turned back to his plants. “He would not have bound you to him with blood magic unless he had a good reason. And the only reason he has would be to regenerate.”
“Regenerate?”
“Restore himself to a flesh body, one that is strong and yet still connected with his world of the dead. He would try to raise himself up to a living god. But he couldn’t do that unless…”
He looked at me again, his eyes considering me.
A seagull called as it circled overhead, and another joined it. I glanced up, squinting against the sunlight, but could barely see their forms as they flew by, their calls fading.
“That must be yours,” he said quietly. “Interesting.”
“Mine?”
“Everyone has his or her own place on the border of death,” he said. “A place that gives them strength and comfort. Mine has fire and renewal. It does not have seagulls. I should have realized that it has taken you some great power to enter a place of which I’ve dreamed. But my mind is fractured even here. It is hard to keep all of the pieces together.”
“I meant to summon you, not to enter your dreams.”
“Very interesting. Imagine what you could do if you could truly focus your powers.”
“What powers?”
He laughed. “You intended to summon me, and yet you ask ‘what powers’?”
“I’m not exactly versed on all of this. I just know that I can summon things and speak a strange language and that the apparition wants me. And you have the answers, so you’re coming back.”
“Adhannor.”
“What?”
“The thing you call an apparition is truly called Adhannor. I had hoped to take that knowledge to my grave, but it is best that you know his name.”
Evalandriel, Dalandaras’ voice echoed in my head. Where are you?
“Look, can we go back to the land of the living now?” I asked. “Your fire and renewal is impressive, but we have things to do.”
“Adhannor and Adhanel. They were both beautiful. But very different in temperament. And they had one important thing that allowed us to do our work.”
“I’ve been nice,” I warned. “I’ve asked you, but now I’m telling you.” I grabbed his hands, and let go of the feeling of that place that was inside of my head and sought out the feeling of my body and the chair and Dalandaras’’ hands on my shoulders. “Come with me. Now.”
And then I was back in the study.
Singael’s eyes met mine. “Very interesting.”
I slid from the chair and landed on the floor. My head spun, but I stayed upright.
“Eva?” Father asked.
“Grandfather?” Dalandaras asked.
“Yes,” Singael nodded, his eyes still on me. “She is one of them.”
“Oh…kay,” I said.
“One of what?” Father asked. “Let’s get you up.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m fine down here, thank you. Just give it a moment.”
Dalandaras knelt next to me, and took the old man’s hands in his. “Are you whole?” he asked in elvish.
“For the moment,” Singael replied. “And you should not blame Alid for what is my punishment.”
“Evalandriel told you.”
“It is easy enough to guess.”
Father and Lorandal lifted me back into the chair. “How are you feeling?” Lorandal asked.
“Fine. Really. I was just more shocked than anything.”
“Ah,” Singael said. “Oh yes. Everybody but Evalandriel, leave!” His voice was strong for a man who had just been on his deathbed. “Out! I will speak with her alone.”
“Grandfather—”
“Dalandaras.” He spoke sharply, but then he smiled. “I know we must talk,” he said in elvish. “And that will be soon. But not at the moment.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Father asked.
I nodded. “I think I’ll need to sleep later, but I’m fine for now.”
The three of them left, reluctantly, and I was left with Singael.
He sat up straight and stretched, the blanket falling to the floor. “It feels strange to be back,” he said in elvish.
“Everything’s been a bit strange lately,” I replied in the same.
“Dalandaras called you Evalandriel. And you speak elvish. The accent is not the best, but otherwise you speak it well.”
“Thank you, I think.”
“Well, Evalandriel, you are an inheritor.”
Inheritor. An image flashed in my mind, of an army of the dead. They were both elf and human, brought back to life, numbering thousands. Some were spirits but others were corpses raised from their graves. Interspersed among them there were tall, stiff creations. They were shaped like the colossus I had fought, and fashioned in the same way of stone and snow. But from these I could feel an aura of unclean power, which should have been left behind and forgotten like the old gods it belonged to.
The army destroyed all that it touched. Trees crumbled to ash and snow melted beneath their feet as they passed over the land.
And I stood facing them. My hair was unbound and falling free. I wore an elf’s robe in pure white, and carried my mother’s sword. I wore a five-pronged crown of my own, and stood alone to face the army. I pointed my sword at them. The power of the old gods filled me, and the army knelt, one by one, spirit, corpse, and colossus alike.
“Inheritor,” I replied, and tried not to vomit. “Right.”
CHAPTER TEN
“You know you are an inheritor, then,” Singael said.
A laugh bubbled up out of me. I couldn’t hold it in. The threat of tears stung my eyes before I managed some resemblance of control. “I had to kill four people today, Singael, because somebody else worked some sort of twisted magic on them. If I had any idea what was going on, I wouldn’t be in this position.”
“Four, you say?” Singael asked. “I think I remember you telling me. It is interesting, lingering on the border of death. Sometimes I remember, in the clearest detail, what people say to me when I am there. And other times I recall nothing at all.”
“If you remember that, then you’ll remember the questions I asked you,” I replied.
Singael braced his himself on the armrests and tried to stand, but he fell back into his chair again. “Help me, please, Evalandriel.”
He didn’t say anything more; he only looked at me expectantly.
I pulled the blanket aside. Gripping his arms, I lifted him slowly to his feet. He started walking, a short, slow shuffle along the wall of the room. I was willing to give him time to get used to coming back from the border of death, but nothing was preventing him from talking while doing it. “Where would you like to start?”” I asked as I tried desperately to forget seeing myself wearing my own five-pronged crown. There was only so much I could handle, and that wasn’t one of them. “With Adhannor?”
“Wherever you would like to start,” he replied.
“Then what is an inheritor?” I asked. The odd feeling struck me again, a strange, cold finality that chilled my skin more than the wind coming off the sea.
“A freak,” Singael replied.
“A freak,” I repeated. Yes, that seemed to be the word for it.
“A miscalculation. The kind of thing that happens when magic and bloodlines become mixed when they should not be. Elves are born with many gifts, but sometimes we want more, and we try to create it. My friends and I were not the first ones to try. Sometimes a descendant appears with the powers that their ancestors tried to create. We named them inheritors.”
“So I’m an accident.”
He nodded. “How many generations have passed for humanity since I and my friends first created Adhannor? On
e hundred generations? More? Your existence is a one hundred generation fluke.”
“But you are elves, and I’m human. How am I possibly related to all of this?”
“Not through me,” Singael replied. “But humans have lived here in the past, before migrating to warmer climates. Adhannor, perhaps, fell in love with one of them, before he changed into the apparition that you have battled. Karallor was certainly friendly to humans, as well, but not Ethilien. She was very disdainful of your race.”
“Maybe it was Adhanel,” I said.
“Yes.” His answer was curt, his arm tense. “Or Adhanel.”
“And you do not know which one?”
“After everything…happened, we scattered. We never saw each other again. Where they went and what they did after, I do not know.”
“But you think one fell in love with a human, and I am an accidental result?” We circled the edge of the desk. Singael’s papers had been disturbed.
He didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t care if he did. “Somewhere in your family, one hundred generations before you, is an elf ancestor.”
“Okay,” I said calmly. I could believe it. I just didn’t want the ancestor to be Adhannor. However distant it was, I had already shared blood with that creature and had no desire for a more permanent connection. “Do you know if there are others?”
“Descended from the five of us, I do not know, but one or two have appeared occasionally in history. Our crimes are not the first time an elf has reached for more power and failed. You are the first human I’ve seen to inherit our powers. There could be more descendants out there, human cousins of yours, who simply do not know the power they posess.”
“And what are these powers that I have supposedly inherited?”
Singael smiled as we paused at the windows. It was growing dark again, and I could already see the green light of the aurora on the horizon. “Have you truly never questioned the changes that were happening? I can see their effect on you.”
“I told you, I just killed four men—”
“It is more than that. It has been thousands of years, but I remember how it felt. You were excited that you could read and understand languages, and not just elvish, but old languages that hold power of their own. You did not need to rest as much as before after walking long distances, or skiing, or climbing. You will not need to sleep so much as before. Have you found it easier to see in the dark as well?”
I nodded. “The darker it is, the better I can see.”
“Have you been in battle?”
“Briefly,” I said. “With a creature of Adhannor’s.”
“And how was your skill? Were you much improved?”
“I’ve never been in battle before…but I charged in without thinking. I had no fear.”
“Then you have already surpassed what we were striving to achieve. Did you truly never question any of this?”
There had been no need to question anything. Ignorance was bliss.
“It will not continue to be so easy,” Singael said as we turned back towards his chair. He smiled at me, but it was tinged with pity. “You cannot have such power without the effects of it. You will come to a point where you will simply collapse from exhaustion.”
“There’s more than physical abilities,” I said.
“I was coming to that,” he replied. “The improved physical abilities were all of our ideas. We were warriors, you see. We were the best at a time when we had enemies to fight. Adhannor was interested not in the fight, as we were, but in the death. Oh, Adhannor.”
I guided him back into his chair. He might have been a warrior, but now he was out of breath.
“He was a fool. He thought that if he could control the powers of life and death directly, there would be no need for warriors. He thought, if he could find a way to slip into the line between life and death, and take that power into himself, he would be able to kill an army with a single glance.”
“He was insane,” I said.
“Yes,” Singael replied. “But you see, he found a way into that line.”
“That is where I found you.”
Singael nodded. “We should have known not to meddle with death itself, but we were young and arrogant. Nor did we question how Adhannor found a way into that sacred space, and we should have. We did not know the lengths he had gone too.”
“Blood magic?”
“I have some idea of what you saw today, because it is what Adhannor once did. But we were too enthralled with what was to be found in death to question how he got there.”
“You found your fire,” I said.
“And you your seagulls,” he replied. “It is, in a way, what we want it to be.”
I sat down. Death. Adhannor had played around with death itself. I could barely wrap my mind around it. What would superstitious Aerik think when I told him? He would find it too hard to believe. In Aerik’s world people drowned, or were killed by gangrene or disease. You couldn’t control death unless you did the killing with your bare hands.
Father would understand, I realized. He tried to stop my exploration into the ruins, only he tried too late. Something told him that there were things down there we shouldn’t meddle with.
“When is it different from what we want it to be?” I asked, but I already had an idea of the answer.
“Adhannor managed to take the power of death into himself. I am still not sure how he did it. But the result is not what he expected. It did two things. The first thing it did was to pervert his shape, and you have seen the result. He is not elf, and yet not a spirit. He is not alive, but nor is he entirely dead. He is immortal, and yet he could have died, if everyone had forgotten of his existence.
“Adhanel had suspicions before the rest of us, you see,” Singael continued. “She discovered one of Adhannor’s blood magic rituals, and changed it. Adhanel was interested in memories of those dead, hoping that she could conjure up images of wars past as a way to remind people of the needless slaughter. So she worked in a magic about memory. In time, all who knew of Adhannor and what he had become would have died, and as fewer and fewer people knew who he was, he and his prison would have crumbled into dust with the passage of years. That will not happen now.”
“But I don’t understand what he wants,” I said. “After all this time, what does he want?”
“He used to want power. But there is not enough left of him to want that. Now he just wants to feed. And he wants you, Evalandriel. You are an inheritor. You are a banquet to him. And the more he feeds, the stronger he will become. He will summon an army. That was the second thing the magic did. The power took his wish to be able to defeat an army with a single blow, and gave him the ability to conjure one of his own.”
“I encountered some of his army,” I said. “And I was able to summon a creature of my own. A woman. I don’t know how I did it. I just…needed help, and she came.”
“You are close to matching Adhannor’s strength,” Singael nodded. “That is good.”
“Does it mean that he is my ancestor?”
“We all gained some of his powers, before we truly realized what was happening. None of us, aside from Adhannor, ever managed to conjure our own army, but it does not mean you did not inherit it from one of us.”
I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth, or lying in an effort to spare me some pain. I tried to remember that there was a hundred-generation gap between Adhannor, but the thought of being descended from him made me feel unclean.
“Who was the woman I summoned?”
“She is what death gave you when you needed it. She will come again if you need her.”
I nodded. Was that what my mother was too, then? But she warned me away from messing with these things.
I rubbed my face with my hands. The tiredness was creeping back, the kind that lingered just behind my eyes and was ready to catch you the moment you dared to close them.
“How are you doing? It is a lot to understand.”
I shook my head. “I
t’s not too hard to understand. It’s ironic.”
“Ironic?”
I lifted my head. “I didn’t even grow up here. I was forced to come here six months ago; I’ve had nothing to do with this place before then. And six months from now, I have every intention of returning south. You are telling me that not only am I a fluke, it is a fluke that I even know I am one. If I had never left Port Darad, never found the ruins, would I even know that I’m an inheritor?”
“Elves do not believe that we all have a destined path, but we do believe that sometimes flukes and mistakes and chances all align. You are an inheritor—you would have found your way here eventually.”
“My mother didn’t have to die to get me here.”
“Oh, I see,” Singael said, sitting back in his chair.
I realized what I said. “Forget it.”
“Adhannor liked to find weaknesses in others, even when he was an elf and still sane.”
“It is not your concern.”
“It very much is. Her death was recent? So your pain is raw indeed. He will use that if he can.”
I couldn’t bring myself to admit that he already had, but Singael didn’t seem to need my confirmation. “You cannot tell my father,” I said.
“He would want to—”
“Or I will tell you no more of what has happened.”
He thought about it, then inclined his head. It was a very Dalandaras action. “If you insist.”
I told him about seeing my mother twice in the ruins, and all that had come with it—the looters, the doors, Dalandaras’ arrival, Adhannor’s appearances, and even the fight with the conjured creature outside of the Fort. “And before we arrived here, while we were still in the mountains, I tried something. I summoned that woman again, just to see if I could.”
“She is your protector, but calling her forward is dangerous when you have not developed the strength and skill.”
“I know that. But something else happened. My mother…” I choked over the word. It was harder to speak of this time. “When I summoned the woman, my mother came too. It wasn’t Adhannor’s doing, I am sure of that. It was my dead mother. We spoke.”
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