THEIR SEPARATE WAYS
The wind hissed across the tips of dead grasses, but
the scent of new, green growth crushed beneath Lynx’s body filled
his nostrils. He gazed up at the sky—it was dull, brooding, but it
was not Blackveil. The alien voices of the forest were gone,
replaced by the ordinary minds of somnolent wolves awaiting the
evening hunt and ground squirrels busy in their
burrows.
He sat up to the
endless, undulating plains before him, and discovered stony ruins
behind him, two partial walls, the rest crumbled to the ground. How
had he gotten here? What happened? Silver glass glinted on his
legs, torso, and arms, slivers he pulled out of his flesh with
sharp little pains and tossed aside. They winked with light as they
fell among the grasses.
They’d been in
Castle Argenthyne, the chamber with the tree, but that’s as far as
he got. Someone moaned nearby.
Another moan and he
found Yates likewise speckled with silver glass, but worse, with
shards deeply embedded like daggers, his flesh pale.
Lynx knelt beside
him. “Yates!”
“The beast burned me
out,” Yates whispered. “She wounded him good, but . .
.”
And then Lynx
remembered—Mornhavon the Black had occupied Yates’
body.
“I am ashes,” Yates
said.
“No, I’ll take care
of you,” Lynx replied, but with each moment, Yates slipped farther
and farther away.
“Tell her . . .”
Yates’ whisper was ever so faint. “Not her fault.”
“I will,” Lynx
promised.
Yates did not
respond. A stillness blanketed him; his eyes, his face, lost all
animation. Lynx clenched his hands and growled as if to threaten
away the looming grief. This was why he stayed solitary, why he
remained aloof from the others. Forming attachments only meant
being speared with unbearable pain when there was loss. His growl
grew into a howl. He howled as the wolves do.
And when his voice
faded over the plains, he gently closed Yates’ eyes.
Telagioth and
Ealdaen found him carrying rocks from the ruins to raise a cairn
over Yates. The wind had taken on a mournful note as it rushed
through the ruins, and Lynx had felt restless souls among
them.
“Friend Lynx,”
Ealdaen said, “let us aid you. We are sorry for Yates, for his
spirit held much joy.”
As they labored with
the rocks, they came to an agreement that they were somewhere on
the Wanda Plains.
“I will know more
when I see the stars,” Ealdaen said.
Neither Lhean nor
Karigan appeared, and after raising the cairn, they spread out and
searched, but without success. Either of the two could be lying in
the deep grasses and they could be missed at even a few feet
away.
At night they took
shelter near the ruins and built a large bonfire from old timbers
they found in the collapsed structure, and dried thatches of grass.
If Lhean or Karigan were out there, perhaps they would see not only
the fire, but the light of Eletian moonstones.
“I judge we are in
the north-central plains,” Ealdaen said, gazing into the sky at the
stars that shone through the clouds. Telagioth agreed with
him.
“I have quite a walk
home then,” Lynx said, missing his Owl intensely.
“As do we,”
Telagioth replied.
“What happened? How
did we end up here all the way from Castle
Argenthyne?”
“We believe it was
the Galadheon,” Ealdaen said, “and that mask. That mask was nothing
to trifle with.”
“The looking mask,”
Lynx murmured, and he remembered. Karigan had smashed it on the
floor at Yates’ feet and then ...
And then he’d
awakened among the grasses.
“It caused a rupture
in the wall of the world.” Ealdaen sounded uncertain of himself. “I
believe so, anyway. And with the Galadheon’s ability to cross
thresholds, it may be that she is elsewhere.”
“And perhaps Lhean
with her,” Telagioth added.
“Elsewhere?” Lynx
asked.
“If what I surmise
is correct,” Ealdaen said, “she could be almost anywhere, anywhen.
But I think it is no mistake the trickster allowed her to handle the mask. Whether he expected her to
destroy it in such a fashion?” He shrugged.
“Yates said Karigan
wounded Mornhavon.”
“We believe it is
so,” Telagioth replied. “We heard the Dark One’s lingering cry of
pain even as we found ourselves here.”
“The rupture was a
terrible, powerful force,” Ealdaen added. “And it was directed at
Mornhavon.”
During the night,
neither of their missing friends appeared at their fireside, so in
the morning Lynx and the Eletians went their separate ways, the
Eletians bearing south toward Eletia, and Lynx, after paying final
respects at Yates’ cairn, began his long trek eastward. He’d come
to the grasslands without his supplies, only what he’d had on him
when he awoke in the chamber of the tree: his clothes, a cloak, and
his knife. Telagioth gave him his longbow and what remained of his
quiver of arrows, as well as his water skin. Both Eletians shared
out some food. With these items and his knowledge of the wild, Lynx
believed he would have no trouble making it to
civilization.
Over his shoulder he
carried Yates’ satchel with his journal inside, as well as his
winged horse brooch. Yates’ brooch would return home into Captain
Mapstone’s hands to wait until some new Rider was called into the
messenger service and claimed it. It had always been this
way.
Lynx carried inside
himself Yates’ loss, a terrible, yawning pit opening up before him.
He shook his head and kept walking.
She tumbled through an abyss of no dimension, of no
known depth; falling, falling through the unending midnight well of
the universe. Light streaked by her in searing hairline strands,
and in great beams humming with energy that punched through the
blackness, driving relentlessly forward, but doing nothing to
illuminate the void.
They were the
threads of lives and worlds, of time and place as she’d seen
through the faceplate of the looking mask, but now she was among
them, as if she’d fallen into the mask,
insignificant, nothing more than a grain of sand in the desert.
Much less than even that.
Some threads
intersected, wove into a grid, weft and warp drawn tightly into
luminous tapestries, while others came glancing close but bypassed
one another, destined never to meet.
Stars and celestial
bodies shone around her, and shards of silver glass glimmering with
their far-off light trailed in her wake like the tail of a
comet.
Realm of the gods. Her own inner voice came to her
from a far off vestige of consciousness.
Consciousness? Was
she even alive? Or was she an incorporeal spirit traversing the
heavens?
But even as her
plummet increased in velocity, she felt mortal fear, a fear that in
this infinite dive, all that she was, all that she had been, and
all that she might become, would slip away until she was nothing
but dust, dust mingling with the shards of silver glass, falling
forever.
Nothing, nothing . . .
Her mind ripping;
her inner voice screaming.
Then great wings
filled her awareness, their beating the rhythm of a heart. They
matched the speed of her fall and the arms of no earthly being
reached out and caught her. He drew her to his chest, a giant’s
chest of alabaster. He hurtled downward with her, his vast wings
gradually slowing their descent.
She looked upon the
visage of a raptor, stars shining in eyes that reflected the
heavens, and there was no mistaking Westrion, the god of
death.
The Birdman has come for me. I must be
dead.
All grew still and
black, and became nothing.
All was still and
black. When Karigan opened her eyes, she could tell no
difference.
Do you have eyes in the afterlife? she wondered.
Artists depicted the souls of the dead with eyes, but how did they
know?
Other sensations
came to her: she lay on smooth, cool stone. The space felt close,
the air thin and poor. Her body hurt, in some places worse than
others.
Not dead, she thought with rising hope.
Just a bad dream. She had only imagined
Westrion’s wings, of being borne in the death god’s
arms.
She patted herself
to make sure and felt flesh and warmth and more pain. She sliced
her palm on a shard of glass jutting from her thigh. She yanked it
out with a cry. Definitely not
dead.
She tried to sit up
but bumped her head on stone. She explored around herself with her
hands. Smooth, cold stone all around her. She was enclosed in a
rectangular box.
Seized by panic she
screamed, kicking and hitting the sides of her prison despite her
broken wrist. Warm blood trickled down her forearms from shredded
knuckles. No one responded to her cries for help. She tried to
force herself to calm down, her breathing ragged.
She would suffocate,
expire in some unknown tomb. No one would ever know what happened
to her, or where to look. Was she still in Blackveil? Elsewhere?
What had the shattering of the looking mask done with
her?
Taking another
shuddering breath, she realized she probably would never find
out.