“I asked you—” Shadow reached for the Sage as she spoke. When she touched the back of his hand with her fingertips, she felt as if all the air in the sky collapsed, filled her up and crushed the life from her.
The World faded away, and in the place of the realm of shadows she welcomed like the warmest embrace, Shadow was thrown into a chaotic realm of ill-defined edges and bright lights. As she oriented herself to her new surroundings, she saw that they were much the same as where she had been. They were still out in the frozen wastes, only much higher, as if they flew along with the clouds overhead. Far below, the frozen sea and the remnants of the Quartz Tower lay glittering like droplets of burning blood in the dying light of the sun. Valour was just where he had been, directly in front of her, his eyes focused on something ahead.
“Val—”
“Silence, Shadow,” Valour said. His voice had an echo, as if he were speaking through a thick veil. His eyes were multicolored—one burning with purple fire, the other with amber. He looked less like Rane and more like him all at once, and there was a terrible heat about him.
Shadow followed the direction of his gaze and was taken aback by the strange normalcy of the sight before her. In the place of some swirling, vaporous beast of nightmare or shining deity, there was a young woman. Her hair was white and her eyes startling green. Apart from that, the only shocking thing about her was the fact that she appeared to be suffering less than the rest of them were. Shadow thought she could see a figure behind her—just the hint of a presence as the clouds wheeled past without wind to push them.
“Ah,” Valour said. “I see you have seen him too, Shadow.” Shadow did not take her eyes from the girl, nor the milky form behind her. “An anchor to chain her to that Valley of hers. Keep her from floating off. Keep me from whisking her away, ripping that bright tether free of its innocent bonds.”
Shadow frowned at the words. Valour seemed to be looking above the girl’s head, but Shadow saw nothing there. No bright tether. No anchor.
“Who is your friend?” Valour asked her. “Who accompanies you so far from home? It is an impressive thing for one so young to navigate the rough waters of the Between with such aptitude.”
“His name is unimportant,” the girl said. Her bright emerald eyes flicked past Shadow as if she weren’t there. Shadow hated her already. “He is one of the Kin. One of yours, perhaps?”
Shadow looked to Valour. He had gained some definition, but the details of his face were still washed out. Shadow looked down at her own hands and saw that they had largely solidified, with a few twisting trails leaking from her elbows. It seemed this place—whatever it was—found it difficult to pin down an image of the Sage and his Ember host, as if it could not reconcile the two.
“I have not counted myself kin to any in some time,” Valour said. “Nor they me. I’m sure your friend of the Valley is old. But few are as old as I.”
The girl considered him as Shadow considered her. Normally, she would seek the nearest patch of blackness, the better to slip in and behind unnoticed, perhaps to catch the girl unawares. She gave the thought up quickly enough, even before those bright eyes switched toward her with a speed and intent she found disquieting. Shadow knew when she was outmatched. She decided to take a step back behind the Sage, balancing strangely on the milky, cloud-covered ground that was less real than imagined below her feet. This was a land of dreams, and Shadow never had them.
“Clever thing,” the girl said, causing Shadow to bristle. Valour laughed, once. His voice sounded less reedy than usual, carrying a bit of the ash and fire of his host. Shadow glanced at his windswept palms, looking for signs of that black-and-orange fire he had called down upon the Quartz Tower, but there was none to be found.
Time passed and Shadow was not sure how much. The red sun seemed to be taking a long time dying in the west, painting the whole of the frozen sea in a bloody golden sheen that pleased her to look upon. This was a battle of pride as much as will. Shadow held no doubt that coming so far from her Valley home took a fair amount of power, but that indistinct and ever-present form at the girl’s back seemed to bolster her, keep her vital.
Still, even patient things ran out eventually.
“Have you come to bid me turn back, young Seer?” Valour asked. The girl only watched him. “Have you come to bid me spare the Frostfire Sage so that she might plunge the world you so love into the ruin you so rue?” He smiled. “Or have you simply come for your friends, and for the sister you would no longer recognize?”
“You’ve done nothing with her,” the girl said. “If you had, I would have known. I wonder,” she spoke before Valour could interrupt, “did they put a scare into you at Center, as I did in the west? Did Linn, Kole and the Landkist of the Valley cause you trouble?”
No answer.
“Why else would you have spared them, if you knew they would end up here, all lines drawing toward the same point?” Shadow thought she sounded certain of herself, but Valour did not seem cowed. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“You fear the answer to that last,” Valour said. “As you always have. You fear that I am right, and that they have seen the truth of it. You fear that your precious heroes have not come this far north and east to save, but rather to kill.”
“You, perhaps.”
“No,” Valour said. “Not I alone. Not all who travel with Linn are so conflicted. Others are pure in their convictions, no matter how they try to hide them. One in particular, and you know of whom I speak. Tell me,” Valour took a step forward, not that it mattered much in this place, “have you always seen this darkness in him? Has Kole Reyna always carried such bitter fire?”
Iyana said nothing, but Shadow knew the look as confirmation.
“It is a good thing for the world that he has it,” Valour said. “That heat that has nothing to do with the Ember fire. That rage that has nothing to do with the vengeance he lost sight of long ago, in a burning citadel. That is a rage made for unmaking. Lucky for us, the Frostfire Sage requires unmaking, lest we face the wrath of what she calls in all her hopeless, helpless folly.”
“You know nothing of my fears,” Iyana said, changing the subject or clinging to the kernel he’d raised.
“Ah,” Valour cautioned, holding up one of those wisping hands, “but Iyana, I have shared a vision with thee. I have felt my life’s thread tangled in yours. I know more of you than you think.”
The girl known as Iyana swallowed. In the place of bluster, her look turned to uncovered determination.
“That can be turned around, you know,” Iyana said. “I, too, felt fear in that shared vision, and it did not emanate from me alone.” She took a step forward, so that the two of them—a picture of life-giving light facing one dealing too long in darkness—formed a mirror.
“If you expect me to deny it,” Valour said, “then you will be disappointed.”
The emotion that passed across the girl’s face was not disappointment or even denial, but rather something more hungry. Something Shadow thought could have been hope. This was what the girl had come to hear: a Sage’s confession.
But why? Had she come to bargain?
“Show me.”
Shadow looked from the girl—the woman, she felt now—to Ray Valour. He examined her. The amber eye dimmed a bit under her scrutiny, while the purple took on a brighter hue.
“Show me what it is you fear,” Iyana said, more forceful. “Show me the World Apart.
Valour did not laugh this time, though he seemed to consider it. “The World Apart is not a thing to fear, Iyana Ve’Ran,” he said, earning a confused look from her that he accepted and one from Shadow that he ignored. “It is a place, just like any other place, full of all the hopes and dreams and dangers inherent in a world blessed or cursed with those who walk upon it.” A strange look passed him by without settling. Shadow thought it made him look human. “At least, it was once.”
Iyana nearly turned to address the fourth member of their company that Shadow could
only see in faint impressions. She now doubted if any of them were truly there—herself included—but the one Iyana had brought with her seemed less so. A strong anchor with which to bind her to her Valley home. Shadow smiled, delighting in the grimace that broke the woman’s face into something a little less serene than what it had been.
“Fine, then,” Iyana said, turning her attention back to Valour, who waited, expectant. “What do you fear, if not a world of Night Lords and wraiths, Dark Kind and Corrupted?” He was leading her, but Shadow did not read anything sinister in the Sage’s intentions, nor threatening in his bearing. He wanted the girl to arrive at the same truth he had without prodding.
“I fear what made it so,” Valour said, matter-of-fact. His tone was subdued, and the once-chaotic storm about them had quieted some. “I fear what drives it now.”
“And what is that?”
“Not a what, I know now,” Valour said. He parted his shadowy lips to say more, but hesitated. Iyana caught it and twitched her right hand, which hung down by her side. Some signal to her companion. A plea to make ready. Valour shook his head. “I do not lead you astray,” he said. “I do not mince words in an attempt to mislead. No,” he sighed. “I am not afraid of what lies at the heart of the World Apart, nor the mindless legions that make up its bogs, marshes and ashen deserts. I respect the Night Lords on their towering obsidian thrones, but I do not fear them. I fear the one they cast down. I fear the one who let them do it, if only to watch what would become of the world that was His before it was any other’s. One whose eye I drew. Me and mine.”
It had the sound of a confession to Shadow, but Iyana did not seem satisfied. She fidgeted, looking less by the second like some wise Seer from afar and more like a child bereft of chances and the answers that might grant her more.
“A Sage?” Iyana asked. “You speak of a great and powerful Sage, who commands the legions of the World Apart.”
“No,” Valour said. He smiled, and now it didn’t seem so much insulting to Shadow as indulging. “No Sage could rival this one. No Landkist that I know, though they have surprised me before.”
“You speak of him as if he is—”
“A god,” Valour said, flat. Shadow had read him when Alistair, Myriel and the rest of those twisted denizens had told him of the Last God in the blue cave. He had not believed them. Or perhaps he had. Perhaps that was why she could not read him, because he did not want it to be true. Because he knew it was. “The Last God.”
Iyana considered him for a time. Shadow knew little of the customs of the Landkist and their charges the world over. Their warring or peaceful kingdoms and their beliefs. She knew they worshipped the world itself, that those in the deserts prayed to the sun and the sand and called them Father and Mother. She had rarely—if ever—heard them worship gods. That was a term for a long-lost age, when charlatans had paraded silver-threaded books about on the backs of whipped mules. It was not a word for these folk, who had power all their own. It was not a word for those who wished to make their own destinies.
What gave meaning to some brought despair to others. Such was the way with gods. Shadow had never believed in them, but doubting a thing meant less than little.
“They told us he was defeated,” Shadow interjected, her impatience remembered. “The Last God. They told us the Night Lords threw him down.”
“Whatever they did—”
“If he was defeated once, and by those sorry souls, he can be again.” Shadow didn’t know why she cared either way. Whoever won in a contest between gods, Sages, Landkist and even men, surely she would lose.
“’They,’” Iyana said, watching Shadow from the corners of her bright eyes, which flickered in time with the unnatural wind. The clouds had begun to close back in. It was darker, now, with the red sun retreating in the west. “You have new companions?” she asked Valour.
He didn’t answer. Only extended his hand. She did well not to recoil, but Shadow could see the need dripping off her. She thought she could see something else, as well. A faint, glimmering thread that trailed behind her twitching hand. Her skin had gone from moon white to milky, almost translucent. Shadow smiled. This girl was using energy to be here. Using it and borrowing it. She could not linger long.
“I have no desire to meet these—”
“Not them,” Valour said, displaying his own halting form of impatience. “One last look into the void. One last look to know I’m right, and that Kole was right before me, albeit for the wrong reasons.”
“Self-preservation is a more noble pursuit than vengeance, now?” Iyana scoffed.
“Nothing more true. Nothing more like to make an enemy into a friend.” Valour splayed his dark fingers, fingers that looked much more like his own in this place of shifting mist than they did down below, where there was still so much of T’Alon to him.
Much to Shadow’s surprise, Iyana reached out without hesitation and grasped Valour by the hand, white intermingling with black and gray. Shadow assumed the two would vanish. Instead, nothing happened for a space of time long or short enough to make her itch. Valour’s bright eyes slid toward her and froze her chest, and then moved to the shimmering, translucent form behind Iyana. Shadow thought she saw the man attempt to step back.
It was too late. They were soon swept up into the same vision of chaos the Sage pulled Iyana into, and Shadow knew what it was to see the World Apart, and to fear it.
The clouds swirled underfoot. No. Not the clouds, but the sky itself, and the world below. Shadow felt like retching and would have if she had been more corporeal. She wanted to scream but couldn’t find the voice to. She expected some rip to open. Some tear to herald the presence of that other realm. Instead, there was only the kaleidoscope of blue, white, gray, red and all the other colors of the world rushing by.
She felt a pull, as if the ground far, far below was trying to bring her back. She worked to tear her gaze from the spinning and saw that Iyana and Valour were standing before her, hands interlocked and facing the other direction. There was nothing solid beneath their feet, and though Shadow was on her hands and knees, she couldn’t feel anything of substance beneath her. To the left of the too-serene pair was the fourth participant in their nightmare. He had gone from milky to starlit. His form was outlined in the brightest light, though it shimmered and shook. Shadow couldn’t make out his features clearly beneath the bright veil he seemed to wear as a shield, but she saw the ears and glowing green eyes that signaled one of the Valley Faey, as Iyana had said.
His teeth were gritted against the strain, and Shadow struggled to think how strong one must be to endure such a shift in the real from so far away.
She swallowed, closed her eyes and breathed, steadying her racing heart. When she stood and looked again, the world had stopped rushing by. They were in a void of almost-blackness, standing in the same position as before. The back of Iyana’s silver hair was lit by something behind. Shadow thought it could have been the stars—that they had moved up into the night curtain itself—but when she twisted her head to peer behind, her heart seized as she saw the dizzying sight.
The world was there. A sheer wall of blue and white with lands beneath. Its continents seemed so small from here, the lands blending between mountain and desert, red and brown. She saw the green lands of Center, which appeared north to her now, though she knew it as west. And to its left, the black encircled cloister that was the southern Valley, and the sweeping deserts the world wore as a cloak, or a place to hide. There was a white ocean at her feet, frozen for untold leagues, and a blue, shimmering one above her head and without the Valley, stretching on past where she could see. She thought it was a singular picture, like a painting on a squared canvas, but as she craned and squinted to see the edges, she saw that they curved out of sight on all sides and in all directions.
How much was beyond the seas? How much beyond the red lands where they had defeated the Twins of Whiteash? Did the rotted lands to the south, where she and the Eastern Dark had been bonded i
n sin and ill company, stretch on forever?
There was something else. A bright light that stung her eyes. Shadow focused on the void beneath her feet and saw the frozen wastes where their bodies truly were. She thought it was the crystal palace of the Witch at first, but then she followed its glowing path. It was like a silver river, or a spider’s web. It reached across the frozen sea and turned sharply upward, piercing the sky just as they had and shooting into the void in which they stood. It lit them like starlight, though it was colder, and as its tendrils passed below them, they grew darker as they met the fingers of another reaching thread.
“There.”
Shadow had never felt true awe before, but as she turned to follow the path of the silvered beam, she thought she knew it. Valour was pointing ahead. The beam continued on, changed, picking up black and red and dark purple, like poisoned blood. At the point of convergence, there was another world. Another canvas stretching beyond their sight.
This one was black and red. It did not lack the details of the bright blue one behind them, but there was a feeling of sameness to it all. The clouds were gray, the lands beneath full of rivers that gave off little light, leaving them black as the rocks they ran over. The red was the work of the land itself. Shadow thought it might be molten rock at first, but she could not see the rivers of orange fire. It was like a rot on the surface of the World itself, and one she shuddered to look upon.
“What is it?” Iyana asked.
Shadow glanced at the Faeykin who had followed her, who was her only link to the lands she had come from. He was flickering like a candle. He looked like he might die, but his features showed no signs of fear. When he looked upon the red and black lands before them, his face hardened.
“It is the World Apart,” Valour said.
“I know—”
“And that,” the Sage ignored her and pointed at the silver thread, “is the sin that will end our own.”
Iyana pulled her hand away from his and stepped forward, walking across a flat surface of nothing. She looked like something out of a dream—a small woman dressed in traveling clothes, trailing a mane of hair beautiful enough for tales. She paused and turned from the vision to look back at Valour.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 52