“Light the fire,” the woman said.
He hesitated just a moment, then took the torch that burned in the east quadrant. Air. Intellect. The mind. The quarter in which he was strongest. He touched the torch to the logs beneath the cauldron, and the fire blazed. The ease with which the fire started did not surprise him. This was a dream, and the rules were different.
The cauldron bubbled, giving off a soft green glow that reminded Raven of springtime and sun-warmed grass.
The woman spoke again. “The center of all is the cauldron of life. The place where Spirit came from unbeing into being. That first magic, that moment of transformation that no one can explain. The breath of the goddess. The dream of Vishnu. The word of the god. Life came into our world, our universe. No one knows exactly how, exactly why. Life came into other universes, other planes, as well. And in other planes, no true life came, but those planes spawned different things.
“There is more to the tale,” she said. “Mysteries beyond mysteries. And you, a scholar, understand that knowledge must be earned.”
She turned to a recessed shelf carved into the wall, a shelf that until now had been hidden in shadow. She took from the shelf an earthenware chalice decorated with intricate spiral designs, and from a hook beneath the shelf she took a ladle. He watched as she filled the chalice from the steaming cauldron.
“The stakes are higher than you know. The thing that comes from the cave will devour all life if it is not stopped. All of the people, the two-legged people and the animal people as well. And even the grains and grasses.”
She passed her hand over the vessel and the liquid cooled and turned dark.
“Never forget that death is just another aspect of life, and life itself is a perilous thing. As a mage and a Ravenscroft you make an unlikely champion, but you are what fate has brought us. The stakes are higher than you know. Will you chance the peril to gain the knowledge you need for the challenge ahead?”
He did not demean the moment by telling himself that the choice didn’t matter, that it was just a dream. Maybe it was a dream, maybe something else, but he knew one thing with a soul’s-deep knowing. If he died here, he would not wake up ever again. He knew with that same certainty that if he not chance drinking from the cup, the world he knew would be devoured by darkness.
Beads of sweat formed on his forehead despite the coolness of the cave. He took the chalice with a shaking hand. It had an odd, earthy flavor, like sage and green tea, but with an underlying bitterness. By the time he drained the dregs, he was swaying on his feet. The auburn-haired woman took the vessel from his limp grasp. He started to fall backward, and two of his companions caught him by the shoulders and eased him to the ground.
It was dark all around, and silent. He could not feel his body. He had no words to explain how he knew he was in another labyrinth, but this time he was alone and could not see the walls. Panic surged through him. That time in Australia he at least had had a dream-body to move through his dream-quest. None of his training and nothing he had learned in his years of study had prepared him for something like this. How could he possibly complete this test if he was nothing in the middle of nothingness?
No. Not quite nothing. He still had his intelligence and his will.
It would make no sense to set their only champion a challenge that could not be surmounted.
He had his will. Certain precepts were the same in all magic; the importance of will was one of those precepts. In a dream-world made of magic, should he not be able to will into existence a body, or at least a near-enough equivalent to work with.
He found a center of calmness, and from there took a few unhurried minutes to remember in deep detail what it felt to have a body. The steady da-dum, da-dum of the heart, so regular that it generally went unnoticed by the conscious mind. The slower rhythm of the breath as the lungs alternately drew in and released air. The temperature difference between the cool air that he inhaled and the warm air that he exhaled, so subtle that he would not feel the change unless he focused. Remembered how gravity gently pulled on the solidity of flesh, how skin passed to his subconscious mind dozens of messages that would combine before passing a judgement on to the conscious mind. It’s hot. It’s cold. This bed is soft. This ground is hard. He blended and shaped those memories and charged them with his will until he no longer had to focus to hold it into being.
He had a body with which to act.
He tried and failed to will sight into being by the same method. After the third attempt, he realized what was wrong. He could will a body into being because a body was a physical thing. Sight was a sense. Furthermore, it needed light to function. For all he knew, he had sight and there was simply no light by which to see. Or nothing there to see.
He had, without thinking, conjured clothes along with his body, perhaps because his memory had added the feel of cloth against his skin. He focused now on the memory of a cool, smooth, rounded weight of a light globe in his hand. But though he brought the full weight of his considerable will onto the thought, no light globe came. Maybe he just needed to rest first—willing one’s body into being had taken a great deal of concentration. And so he gave himself time to recover. . .fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe. He had only his own subjective sense of time to judge by, and he’d read somewhere that complete darkness confused internal clocks more than almost anything else outside of actual drugs. When he judged himself ready, he focused again on the memory of holding a light globe. No, his light globe. The small, portable one he had spelled himself. Surely the specificity of the recollection would help.
It didn’t.
Though no one had mentioned a time limit to complete this unknown task, Raven felt in his bones that he needed to hurry. Needed to finish this task and return to his real-world body before his tie to it weakened. Needed to return and stop the darkness from the Devil’s Boneyard cave before it devoured the world.
So he would continue without light. He could do this. Carefully he got to his hands and knees. He slid one hand over until he found a wall. Hmm. Either this place had not been an absolute void to begin with, or his willing a body into being had also brought into being a floor and walls. His initial instinct that this was another labyrinth had at least some support. At minimum, one needed walls in order to have a labyrinth. He used his hand on the wall as support as he got to his feet. Either the complete darkness disoriented him or the potion he had drunk had left him a bit light-headed still.
He started to walk, one hand on the wall for support. Its surface, rough and uneven, felt as though it had been hewn from solid rock. He felt with his foot on each step, making sure the floor was solid before trusting his weight to it. In the Guardian adventures he’d read as a boy someone was always falling through the rotted timbers of a mineshaft or stumbling into a sinkhole. He wasn’t sure either danger applied to his current situation. He was no more a spelunker than he was a Craft practitioner. There were many, many things at which he counted himself competent, and yet this last week the universe seemed determined to throw in his face all the countless things for which he had neither skill nor knowledge.
He made slow progress, fighting the urge to move with more speed and less caution. He took each left turn he came across, remembering the hero-Guardian in some story using that trick to successfully navigate the villain’s maze. Whether the strategy actually worked or whether it was some hack-writer’s invention, he dared not hazard a guess. He refused to think too hard about the other holes in the logic of that story, starting with why the villain dropped the hero in the maze in the first place when it would have made far more sense to incinerate the man with magefire.
His limbs grew heavy with exhaustion, and the darkness seemed to press down on him with the weight of mountains. He had no idea how much time had passed. Too much, surely. He became more and more certain with each step that he was utterly and irrevocably lost. A time or two he stopped, hesitated. Turned back the way he had come for a few steps, only to reverse himself and conti
nue in his original direction. If he were the protagonist of the sort of Guardian adventure tales he’d read as a child, he would know the right path by the way his footsteps echoed, or the way the air smelled, or from some slight breeze that only the hero noticed.
Damn. He wondered if he’d be just as well off sitting on the floor and waiting for whatever end came to those who failed a vision quest, or whatever the hell this was.
Only he couldn’t. Giving up was another of those things he’d never developed a talent for.
He continued on, wondering with every step if he might be going further in the wrong direction. Maybe he should turn around and try to find another route that might take him—wait! Was that faint light ahead, in the distance? He picked up his pace, going as fast as he dared toward the odd blue-white miasma, ignoring the part of his mind that urged caution of the unknown source. Closer now, he could make out human figures in the light. Closer still, and some of the figures seemed almost familiar.
And then he stopped with a gasp and took an involuntary step back.
In front of him were men and women he had killed at his late master’s behest, upright as in life, but showing horrible burns from magefire and spell lightning. A few were little more than gory, bipedal masses, as though they had been hastily reassembled from disemboweled and dismembered corpses. Some eyes held sadness and betrayal. Some held mindless rage.
“No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “No, no, no.”
He had never forgotten who he had been. What he had done. But to the best of his ability, he had put that past behind him and tried to move on. Except now the past was literally in front of him, barring the way.
The dead shuffled forward, closing the distance, forming a semi-circle. He could no longer keep his eyes on all of them at once.
“No.” He raised his voice. “You can’t be here. This can’t be real.”
A dark, rich laugh came from somewhere in the middle of the ranks of the dead. “Real? My dear Raven, my dark star, my betrayer, you of all people know that nothing is real here, not even you. Which means everything is real.”
He knew that voice, knew its gently chiding tone and the deadly danger that lurked beneath it. William. The front lines of the dead parted to reveal the blond mage, as handsome in death as in life, blood still staining his left side. He was flanked by the students Raven had led to their deaths in a Guardian trap.
Raven fell back another step and licked his dry lips. “You can’t be here. I drove the blade into your heart, and I held you while you died. I saw your body interred in my own family’s cemetery as there was no one else to claim it.”
“And yet here I am.” William spread his arms. “Here we all are.”
Raven took a deep breath and drew himself up, standing firm now against William’s sauntering approach. “No. You are things pulled from my own memories, playing upon my guilt. But I do not feel guilty for your death, William. I do feel sorry for the life you led, though it was none of my doing. And those who I killed in your name, their blood stains my soul, yes, but it stains yours as well.”
“And for the students who trusted you, the students you led like lambs to the slaughter?”
Raven flinched. “They were hardly lambs. They would have murdered countless innocents had I not tipped off the Guardians to the coming attack.”
“Ah yes, you were already wagging your tail for your new masters, even then. Was it so easy to betray a trust?”
Raven swallowed hard. “Nothing about that night was easy. But I did the best I could to prevent as many deaths as possible. I will not let guilt over past actions stop me from what I must do.”
“What about this man?” William reached behind him to pull forward a pale, dark-haired young man without any visible wounds. “Can you forgive what you did to your own loyal apprentice?”
Daniel. Raven’s breath left him as if he had been punched in the solar plexus. He stood motionless as the young man approached.
“Remember him?” William said. “Remember how you demanded that he give up his own power, his very life, to charge the Ravensblood?”
Remember? He could never forget, no matter how hard he tried to keep this particular sin to the back of his mind. Not only had he betrayed Daniel; that in and of itself had been unforgivable. But Cassandra had been his apprentice before Daniel. Had she not had the strength and fire to leave, it would have been her death that charged the Ravensblood.
Raven wrapped his arms around himself, suddenly cold. “You commanded me to do it.”
“I commanded you to do it,” William repeated, mocking. “A convincing argument, except that you failed to turn the Ravensblood over to me as I asked. Instead, you lied to me about your success and kept the Ravensblood for yourself, to use against me.”
Daniel spoke to him then for the first time. “I would have followed you, you know. I would have gone over to the light with you, had you only asked.”
Whether this was truly Daniel’s ghost or just a product of his own memory and guilt, Raven could not say. But he knew in his heart that the specter spoke truth. “I hadn’t planned to leave before that. Your death, and my part in it, was the final tipping point. I knew then that I could not go on.”
“Convenient, that,” Daniel said with a bitterness he had never shown in life. “Considering that it left you with the Ravensblood.”
Raven lowered his head, taking several deep breaths before he found the strength to meet Daniel’s gaze. “I have many, many regrets from that time in my life, but your death weighs the most heavily on my soul.” He stepped forward, offering his hands to the specter of his apprentice. “I know that there can be no forgiving the depth of my betrayal, but I am sorry. I am so very sorry.”
Daniel reached out his hands to clasp Raven’s. For a moment he felt the warmth and solidity of flesh against his own. And then the touch was gone, and the ranks of the dead before him were gone as well. He stood alone once more in darkness, his own heartbeat thundering in the silence. He continued on.
That first the encounter, unsettling as it was, encouraged him. At least he had proof that he was not trapped in endless emptiness. And if he had met a challenge, surely that must mean that he was on the right path? But as the dark paths seemed to lead only to more dark paths, he began to doubt. Perhaps his encounter with the dead was meant as a reminder of his past crimes, before he faced the sentence of eternal nothingness.
No. He refused to believe that. If nothing else, the universe was not wasteful. He was more use in the real world actively trying to do good than he was down here wandering in endless darkness. He remembered the warmth of Daniel’s hands in his. It felt like a final farewell, yes, but it also felt like forgiveness.
And then, up ahead, he saw a dim red light that grew brighter as he approached. It took him longer to recognize the figures that stood out against the muddy crimson glow, but then he had never known them in life. He had only seen them in oil portraits that had hung on the walls of Ravenscroft mansion. With the exception of a few Victorian portraits of outstanding artistic merit, most of those portraits now gathered dust in the attic. Cassandra had replaced them with local artists’ renditions of the mountains, forests, and waterfalls of the Pacific Northwest, a change which made the house feel more like a home and less like a mausoleum.
He squared his shoulders and lifted his chin defiantly. “You aren’t here. You aren’t real. Your time is long past.”
“We are as real as you are. Our blood runs through your veins.” The man who spoke had steel-gray hair and Raven’s hawk-like nose. Age had not withered the strength of his carriage nor the proud tilt of his chin.
Raven put a portrait to the face and a name to the portrait. Gwiliam Ravenscroft, Raven’s great-grandfather.
“Your power, your mind, your strength of will, all of that came from us,” Gwiliam continued. “Do you really think you could use those gifts against your forefathers, you disobedient child?”
Raven shivered, breath catching in hi
s throat, feeling like a child indeed. A child awaiting punishment by the dark magic of his father and helpless to escape his wrath. His legs felt weak, as though at any moment he would drop to his knees to beg for mercy that would not come.
No. He should have recognized the sense-of-dread spell sooner. He’d never known it to be this powerful; it was augmented, perhaps, by the place, by the conjoined effort of some of the most powerful mages who ever lived, by the blood ties—who knew what the rules were here? But he would not be defeated by mere fear. If they were able to hurt him, they would have done so by now. His ancestors had never hesitated to use dark magic in the entire history of the Ravenscroft family.
He took a steady breath and forced himself to match Gwiliam’s proud stance. “I acknowledge the gifts I have inherited from the Ravenscroft line. They make up a large part of who I am. But just as the oak is not the acorn, I am not my ancestors. I am what I have made of myself from those qualities. If you do not care for what I am, then I am sorry. But you can no more control the future of our line than I can control its past. I hope, wherever you are and in whatever state you exist, you can someday make peace with that as I have made peace with your memory.”
He hadn’t known what he was going to say until he said it, but he felt this new truth down to his bones. He closed his eyes and stepped forward. The flash of magefire flared bright even against his closed lids.
He held his breath, waiting for the pain. It didn’t come. He released his breath slowly and opened his eyes. He was not burned. There had been no magefire, and his ancestors were gone. Had they ever been there? He leaned back against the solidity of the stone, weak with relief. Was any of this real?
“What is reality?” he asked aloud, just to hear the sound of his own voice.
His legs ached from walking. No matter what their definition or degree of realness, each encounter had taken much of his strength. And yet he had no choice but to go on.
Gradually he realized that the quality of the darkness had changed, or else his eyes had finally started to adjust to the dark. There were shadows now, shapes, as if this nowhere place were growing more real somehow. From one of the dark alcoves stepped a shape, a man dressed head to toe in buckskins. He wore a loose-fitted tunic, beaded elaborately, like a ceremonial shirt he might have seen in a museum. No glow surrounded him as it had his predecessors. Raven knew, without words to explain why, that this man was real, or at least as real as Raven himself was in this place. Did he hear breath echoing off the walls? Or maybe it was the subtle rattle of the beads. If he had paid more attention to these things on his General Academy field trips, he might have even recognized the tribe by the style of beadwork. This was no cheap re-creation; it felt authentic. Raven would bet his whole library that those beads were antler or bone and polished stones. The stranger was a young man. Morgan’s age, maybe a little older. His skin was a deep reddish tan, his long hair in two simple braids that hung down each shoulder. His eyes blazed with anger.
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