Goldenmark

by Jean Lowe Carlson

  “I make of myself a resonance beyond light and darkness,” she murmured in her haunting alto as she came to sit upon the floor beside him. “And then creatures of lower vibration cannot touch my Essence in the Void.”

  Jherrick shuddered, feeling one of those touches try to invade again. Ethirae set her palm to his bare chest between the high open collar of his quilted silver-white robe. He panicked a moment, recalling the sensation of the imposter Olea reaching inside him during his encounter in the cave, but Ethirae’s touch was warm and mild.

  “Darkness haunts you since your Resurrection.” Watching his eyes, Ethirae’s silver-white brows knit. She cocked her head, pressing her palm deeper. Fingers of light eased through Jherrick, and then her presence slid up the back of his neck into his mind. Jherrick felt his thoughts sorted through, flipped fast like a deck of fate-cards. Until one memory rose: cold red eyes lancing straight to Jherrick’s soul. Ice speared his veins and he cried out. Ethirae set her other palm to Jherrick’s forehead, suffusing his mind with a wave of white light. The memory roiled back to a frozen nightmare and Ethirae lowered her palm from his forehead, though Jherrick could still feel a wave of light sighing into him from her.

  “The Red-Eyed Demon has made claim upon you, Noldrones Jherrick,” she breathed. “Only those of terrible power are so cursed by its choice.”

  “Why does it want me?” Jherrick shivered.

  “The Demon seeks to walk the world again, in a body – yours.” Ethirae sighed. “It possesses only the strongest of any Age. Only those who have the power to bring unfathomable ruin. Long ago, my people fought the Demon when it came to us.”

  Jherrick shivered as his heart gripped unnaturally. He knew that something dark lay inside of him, that understood death and annihilation. Ethirae’s words sparked Jherrick’s curiosity. “Your people, the Albrenni. They fought this thing?”

  “Long ago.” Ethirae let her other hand fall from his skin, as she watched him. “My people were Undone by the Demon. The Albrenni will never forget the taste of its destruction. There are but a handful of us left in the Manyworlds, most of whom are safe here in the Sanctuary, like myself and Noldrones Flavian. A few still steward the world you come from, hoping for a better Age. They hide themselves well, lest they attract the Demon’s gaze.”

  “What exactly are Albrenni?” Jherrick reached out, touching her high cheekbones, running his fingers over her starlight skin.

  “I am not forbidden to show any member of the Noldarum. Now that you are initiated, would you like to see my true form?” She smiled.

  “Yes,” Jherrick spoke before he could stop it, eager to see the truth of this creature before him.

  With a soft smile, Ethirae turned her head and kissed the tips of his fingers. Still sitting upon the floor, she began to un-hook her silver-white robe from its high collar, revealing her smooth collarbones and chest. Slipping the quilted silk off her shoulders, she bared delicate breasts and slender, firm flesh untouched by time.

  As the robe sighed down over her hips and puddled to the stone, Jherrick’s breath caught. Not only was she beautiful, but her energy brightened the Void, swirling in a vortex of color. With an in-breath, she raised her palms over her head. And then with a swift cry, Ethirae brought her hands down, fingers gripping the Void with power. Light burst from her in a tremendous wave; like the explosion of a falling star, it smote Jherrick’s senses. Enormous every-color wings burst from her spine in the world of the real, seven layers of them, surging to the far corners of the oculus-room. Her cry was that of a raptor as energy surged from her, slamming Jherrick back – a maelstrom vortex that thrust into the depths of the Void and made its ascendency known.

  Fallen back to his elbows upon the agate-stone floor, Jherrick stared in awe. As the light dimmed, he saw before him a bird-woman with sleek down of milk-silver, angelic features and wings, her endless eyes boring into his soul. With a subtle shake, she riffled the wings, though they were not exactly feathers. Like filaments of woven light, they ran with rippling currents, like water pouring over cliffs, though they held the form of a bird.

  “Aeon!” Jherrick breathed.

  “See me, Child of Man,” Ethirae spoke, her voice riven with an eagle’s cry. “See an Albrennus Fellasti of the First Darkening. When humankind was in its infancy, we were ascendant. We held the darkness at bay with the Giannyk of Krethwathsten, of Heimhold, and of Hakkim Beldir; with the great tundra Kings of Rikiyasti, of Fithri Ile, and the desert-builders of Aj Naab. We were there to battle back the Demon’s First Rise, though we lost everything. And we are here still.”

  Wafting out, one filament of those massive wings eased over Jherrick’s forehead, pressing the center of his brow in a surge of light. Like a river’s wash, Jherrick felt ancient memories flow into him. Five thousand years ago. Entire valleys running crimson from battles. Mountains exploding from terrible feats of wyrria. Herds annihilated in moments from a blast-wave through a grassland, killing everything it touched. Cities of men and women and children, walking mesmerized, coming to kill him. A tundra battle-plain, blue ice stained crimson with gore unto every horizon. The dead, rising to battle, their eyes blind red horror.

  Jherrick fell back, gasping, his hands clutching his heart – trying to stop it, but Ethirae’s memories flooded in, unable to be stopped. It was too much, the horror, the suffering. Jherrick’s mind fled. His consciousness flashed out as he retreated to the furthest reaches of the Void to escape, but horror followed him into the Void, Jherrick’s own screaming terror its doorway. Red eyes rushed up from the darkness, obliterating. Swallowing his vision, the red eyes eliminated stars, annihilated galaxies. The entirety of the cosmos was swallowed by cold, burning red, as despair screamed inside Jherrick.

  Suddenly, an enormous wave of light and color sluiced around him. Pushing back the red, devouring it until nothing was left around Jherrick but a warming blue-white glow. Some part of him felt hands lifting him, raising him to a soft bed of woven vines. Gradually, his mind risked returning and found that three Albrenni held a circle around him, arms wide, miraculous wings spread to their fullest through the dusk-dark chamber.

  Jherrick recognized Noldrones Flavian and Noldra Ethirae holding that circle, but the third was a stranger. A man that looked like he’d been ancient when time began, his face was gouged with lines and criss-crossed with scarring. One eye was blind and as he blinked at Jherrick, that eyelid did not close, leaking tears. His face was the visage of hawks in battle, his shoulders wide and straight. The feel of power wreathed his roped muscles and massive chest. A good deal taller and more rugged than his kin, he wore the silver robe of the Noldarum. Spread wide, his hands had black talons upon their gnarled fingertips as he gripped power into the Void, his forearms corded sinew and wreathed with arcane tattooing in a devouring black ink. That dead eye fixed upon Jherrick, and in it, Jherrick saw vast and terrible knowledge.

  “Lay still boy.” The ancient Albrennus commanded, his voice graveled like a battle-lord.

  Ethirae held her spread-winged pose, reaching out a tendril of energy to press Jherrick back to the bed of vines. “Forgive me. Unveiling my true nature was too much. I had no idea how deep you could go into my memories.”

  But Jherrick was done being ignorant, struggling up to sitting. “No. I need to know what’s going on. What is this Demon, and why is it after me?”

  “At last.” Flavian lifted an eyebrow with a subtle quirk of lips, a rare expression of amusement.

  “Boy has some piss in him. Good. He’ll need it.” The ancient Albrennus spoke again.

  “Need it for what?”

  “To face the Undoer.” The old Albrennus gave him a blind eyeball and Jherrick shivered under that uncompromising gaze. Red eyes rose in his mind, but distant, pushed back through a swath of everycolor light from the circle’s power. With a hard in-breath, the ancient Albrennus broke the circle at last, catching himself upon a gnarled fist to the vines as his wings snapped down with a wrenching, haphazard motion
. Crushing white flowers upon the bier with his fist as his mangled wings eliminated more around the room, the ancient Albrennus’ gaze pierced Jherrick. “We banished it. But only for a time.”

  “What is it?”

  “Such innocence,” the old Albrennus snorted, his ancient eye flashing with temper. “To have lived in a world so safe for so many eons, all because we made it so.”

  “Come.” Flavian was polite, gesturing for Jherrick to rise. “Your training among us will need to include far more than we ever thought, Noldrones Jherrick. Please. Walk with us.”

  Jherrick found his limbs stable as he pushed up off the bed of flowering vines and fell into step next to Flavian. The Herald’s filamentous wings siphoned out to the Void as he walked, as if they had never been, while Ethirae folded hers neatly along her spine like a luminous cloak. The old Albrennus’ broken wings merely dragged behind him, the group silent as they proceeded out beneath a flowering archway and into a vaulted corridor high above the minarets of the citadel.

  But rather than take the winding stair that led toward the citadel’s center, Flavian chose a lofty bridge toward the outer vistas of the city. Jherrick beheld the vastness of the cosmos as they moved down one corkscrewing staircase to a succession of vaulted platforms. At last, they came out upon a massive cloverleaf plaza, at the far edge of which stood seven white archways. Everycolor mist rippled through those archways like billowing silk, and Jherrick had the sensation of a thousand whispers in the Void. The hairs on the back of his neck pricked, his animal senses instantly alert.

  Suddenly, a memory hit him. Of twisting upon that platform, spat out through one of those archways in pain and screaming, from the crystal blood Plinth near Khehem. Walking forward, Jherrick came to the center of the expanse of agate. Haunting strains of music with a thousand impossible chords moved through those archways, as if they accessed not just other worlds, but other universes through a vast and intelligent nowhere that sang as it danced. Mesmerized, Jherrick thought he saw sigils in the mist, strange and mutable, before they moved on.

  “Haunting, isn’t it? Seeing how the World Shaper moves?” Flavian stood at his side, gazing at the arches.

  “The World Shaper?”

  “That which creates.” Flavian moved his hand in an expansive gesture, indicating the endless galaxies beyond the platform, that dropped off to an infinity of stars all around. “And the ability within us all, for us to create in turn.”

  “Is the World Shaper a god, or goddess?”

  “Nothing so limited,” Flavian’s lips quirked. “The name was passed to us Albrenni eons ago by ones far more ancient than us, who fought for our maturation as a species. Like your humankind, we were once coarse, reckless, short-lived and short-sighted. We fought wars, decimated our brethren over land and ore, learned magic for power and bred wyrric bloodlines to dominate. But those who were old when we were young showed us the majesty of the World Shaper’s benevolence, and warned us against the terror of her counterpart.”

  “Her counterpart?” Jherrick turned to Flavian, but it was the gruff old general who answered.

  “The Undoer, boy. I do believe you’ve met.” He gave an amused snort. Reaching up, he rubbed away leakage from beneath his ruined eye. “As I did, long ago.”

  “Who are you?” Jherrick’s gaze sharpened upon the old warrior.

  That ancient gaze fixed on Jherrick. “My name is Archaeon Stranik, of the Heimhold Giannyk and the Sephali clan of the Albrennus Fellasti. But you might know me by my shortened name. Aeon, I do believe your people curse to me.”

  Jherrick couldn’t speak. He would have thought it a joke except that the old warrior held his gaze with such penetrating force that his guts liquefied. “Aeon? But Aeon is just a... symbol.”

  “Is he?” The ancient warrior chuckled, wrinkles of amusement pulling his scar-torn lips up. “Well, then I can just lay down in my grave and be symbolically dead, I suppose.”

  “You’re serious?” Jherrick was a fool to ask, but the claim was so outlandish that he still couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

  Flavian actually chuckled beside Jherrick, a smile of amusement upon his features. “Deeds of heroes become legend. Legends die into myths when a culture falls and only stories live on, passed by mouth. Myths become gods eventually, worshipped as supreme, but supremely misunderstood. So did your people who once lived upon the tundras recount the deeds of Archaeon Stranik, King Trevius Stranik’s High General, who sacrificed himself when all forms of battle failed against the Red-Eyed Demon. A warrior born of two ancient races with vast wyrria, who was strong enough to hold the World Shaper’s Key, and brave enough to transform the world by allowing the Demon to take him instead of his half-brother Trevius. Archaeon became the Light of Creation, to save the world. He is the only one, as far as we know, who has ever lived to tell the tale.”

  “If you can call it living.” The ancient war-general flexed his wings in a haphazard shuffle and Jherrick noticed that they moved in a cumbersome, jerking motion. Peering closer beneath the endless night, he saw the ancient man’s filamentous wings were torn, broken, forming odd angles as if they had been shattered but never set right. Black scars rippled through them like waves of fire burned through and gone. As Jherrick peered at the man’s skin, he saw Archaeon’s flesh was the same, flowing with ancient burn scars, in addition to terrible slash-marks.

  As a pained expression took Archaeon’s face from trying to settle his wings straight, Ethirae moved to his back. Pressing her slender body to his spine, she wrapped her arms around his massive chest and set her lips to the center of his back, as high as her diminutive form could reach. Spreading her wings wide behind his broken ones, Jherrick felt her inhale the power of the stars. He saw her breath in the Void, gathering runnels of light. And then she pressed her lips deep upon Archaeon’s spine, and breathed every bit of that light into him.

  He arched in her arms, wings lifting, vibrating. He drew in a massive breath and for a moment, Jherrick saw the man’s form brighten in the Void, whirling with color like the archways. And then he darkened, as if that light siphoned right back out through a thousand rents, flowing back to the universe. Archaeon relaxed in Ethirae’s arms. Set a hand to her wrists where they encircled his massive but emaciated frame.

  “Thank you, my dear,” he rumbled gently. “That wasn’t necessary, but thank you.”

  “I won’t stand by and watch you suffer.” She moved away, but Jherrick could see how much that action had taken from her. Her aura guttered low in the Void, grey and slow in its ethereal spin. He thought she would have simply gathered energy to heal, but it seemed even her abilities had limits, as she did a rapid panting breath to increase her brightness by painfully tiny increments.

  “Archaeon’s wounds cannot be healed,” Flavian spoke, watching where Jherrick was looking. “They are wounds of the etheric body, and no wyrria we’ve ever found, among any peoples or world, has been able to heal his tremendous sacrifice. Accepting the runic markings to become the World Shaper’s Key, her instrument to battle the Demon, is not a thing to be taken lightly. It never was.”

  Jherrick’s gaze roved over those burned-out inkings that swirled over Archaeon’s skin as the man reached up to wipe his leaking eye. Like the emptiness in a house when the fire has left it in ruins, it was as if Jherrick could see the destruction within Archaeon. Black tendrils wove through his etheric body. Thousands of rents and ripped places where he leaked energy back to the Void. Those rents tore through his physical body also, a warrened darkness that ate him alive and left him a ruined husk.

  “The magic, this – Key.” Jherrick spoke, understanding. “It burned through you, left you unable to regenerate. You would be like them,” he nodded to Flavian and Ethirae, “able to stay ever-young, had you not carried it.”

  “Great power comes with great sacrifice.” Archaeon turned his formidable gaze upon Jherrick, piercing like an eagle’s talons. “How does one transform ultimate destruction? Only by carrying the
greatest creationary power any world has ever seen. A power that transforms the Demon when he tries to rise, and allows a Golden Age to finally come to fruition. Except for the Albrenni and the Giannyk and our human allies, our Golden Age fell with the Demon’s Rise. We misunderstood wyrria, and we paid for it. Unto the last of our sons and daughters.”

  “What do you mean?” Jherrick asked.

  “Power attracts power,” Flavian interrupted, solemn. “The more one masters wyrria, the more that person becomes desirable for the Demon to inhabit. Our people were accomplished in wyrria. Though you are young and your power unlearned, the Demon feels what you might one day become, Noldrones Jherrick. Something truly powerful. A power that can tear down worlds and cause the endless destruction the Demon covets – which was why the Giannyk and Albrenni were also desirable to the Demon, in our time.”

  “My half-brother, Trevius,” Archaeon spoke again, “had the same wyrria that breathes in you, boy. The Path of the Dead, the Giannyk called it, where I was raised in the stronghold-citadel of Heimhold, which is far north in the lands now called Elsthemen. My father, Ulfgrad Stranik, bore four sons. Two with Giannyk women, great battle-Queens of the north. Another born of a human tundra-witch with uncanny ability, who saved my father’s life in the wild. And the last born of the Honoress of the Albrenni, the Eagle-People’s High Priestess, who gave her body to him as part of a truce our people formed then. I was the child of that union.”

  “Half Giannyk and half Albrenni?” Jherrick murmured.

  “Yes.” Archaeon nodded. “My Giannyk half-brothers, Bhorlen Valdaris, named for his mother’s royal line, Trevius Stranik, and Vrennen Stranik Tundra-Born, were all great men. Bhorlen was a powerful Portalsmith and Sigil-Wright, Vrennen a masterful Portalsmith, and I held prowess as a Battle-Dremor, and a General in the field. But Trevius...Trevius had power. Fighting prowess, cunning, magnetism. Worst of all, he understood the Path of the Dead, which the Albrenni call louve wyrdi, and humans nicknamed Dusk wyrria. Trevius knew how to wield it. How to keep someone alive even after they were cut to ribbons upon the battlefield. How to banish life from a healthy warrior. And how to restore life to the dead.”