The Obsidian Oracle

by Denning, Troy

  The king had looked into obsidian depths many times before, and always he had found some hint of light: a gray-streaked flaw, tiny bubbles with a pale gleam trapped inside, an impurity that gave the whole stone a colored tint. Not so here. The blackness of the Oracle was more absolute than at the bottom of Tyr’s deepest iron mines, or even inside the cryptic dungeons of the Golden Palace. More than the absence of light, the lens held within it the embodiment of darkness.

  Tithian smiled. Had he been born a dwarf instead of a human, his life’s focus would surely have been to find this lens.

  The king shuffled forward, stepping out of the mica tunnel and into the small chamber with the Dark Lens. The room was lit by a curtain of crimson rays spilling down from above. When Tithian looked up to find their source, he was astonished to see the sun’s fiery orb shining down through a wide fissure that ran the entire length of the ceiling. The crack was just a little wider than a man, and, like the room itself, lined with glistening sheets of mica.

  As Tithian tottered forward on his old man’s legs, the uneven floor crackled with each step, the ends of mica sheets bending and popping beneath his weight. He felt a sweltering heat rising from the Oracle. The closer he approached, the more flushed and tender his skin felt. Beneath his robes, sweat began to roll down his body in runnels, and soon wisps of steam were rising from the finely woven hemp of his garments.

  At last Tithian reached out and touched the glassy surface of the lens. A soft sizzle rose from beneath his fingertips and searing pain shot through his hands.

  Without removing his hands from the hot glass, Tithian worked his way around the lens, his heart pounding with anticipation as he ran his fingers over every inch of its searing surface. He did not stop until he felt blisters rising on his wrinkled flesh.

  “By Ral, not a flaw anywhere!” Tithian cried, his voice trembling not with agony, but exhilaration. “Nothing but the Dark Lens could be so perfect!”

  Continuing to whisper the word “perfect” over and over, the king went to the narrowest end of the lens and placed his satchel on the ground. Putting one foot just inside the mouth, he grabbed the other side and pulled. Slowly the orifice began to widen, the sack’s magical cloth stretching to many times its original size. As the aperture grew large enough to walk into, Tithian felt a cool breeze and saw a whirling gray murk inside.

  When the king had stretched the sack as far as his arms would allow, he placed the satchel’s mouth over the narrow end of the lens and pulled. As the Oracle slowly passed inside, the opening expanded almost to the point of tearing, but the body of the satchel did not bulge or swell at all. To all appearances, it looked and felt as empty as it ever had.

  Eventually, Tithian pulled the sack up to the point where the lens touched the floor. Stretching his arms wide, he reached around the back of the Oracle and grabbed both sides of the bag. He pressed his chest and face against the glass and rocked the huge stone, each time pulling the satchel a little farther along. Soon, only the end remained outside.

  His chest heaving from his exertions and his face burning where it had been in contact with the hot glass, Tithian sat down on the floor and braced his feet against the lens. With a feeble groan, he pushed against the stone, at the same time pulling on his magic sack. Aching knots of pain formed in his thighs and forearms, but the lens did not move. His newly aged muscles were not up to the task.

  Cursing his weakness, Tithian closed his eyes and opened a pathway to his spiritual nexus, preparing to use the Way. To his surprise, he did not feel the familiar surge of energy rising from deep within himself. Instead, his feet seemed to meld with the lens, and the heat of its surface ceased to burn his soles. A torrent of energy rushed from the Oracle up through his legs. The stream flowed into his abdomen, where he had expected to feel the warm tingle of his own energies, and formed a smoldering knot that seemed ready to burst into flames.

  The king felt more excited than afraid. That the energy had come to him through the obsidian sphere only confirmed what he had guessed earlier: it had to be the Dark Lens.

  Putting his growing delight out of his mind, Tithian pictured the most powerful gladiator he had ever owned. An image of Rikus slowly emerged inside his mind: a rugged face, pointed ears set close to a bald pate, and a hairless body that seemed nothing but knotted sinew and thick bone.

  Once he had the picture securely locked in his thoughts, the king substituted his own face for Rikus’s. The expressive black eyes were replaced by beady brown ones, the heavy-boned features became thin and haggard, and a long tail of graying hair dangled from what had once been a bald head. The resulting image, an old man’s gaunt face sitting upon a mul’s powerful shoulders, seemed ludicrous even to the king.

  Tithian opened himself to the fire in his stomach, calling on it to empower the image he had created. The energy rushed into his sinews, charging them with new life and vitality. In his bones and joints he felt a suppleness that he had not experienced in decades. The king flexed his muscles, rejoicing in his body’s newfound vigor—then screamed.

  A burst of agony shot through Tithian’s arms. The muscles began to swell, taking on the dimensions and shape of those he had pictured on Rikus’s body. The change did not occur solely inside his head, nor was it illusory, as he would normally expect from using the Way. The power of the lens was actually transforming him.

  Tithian watched in astonishment as the rest of his body changed into that of a mul. After his arms came his shoulders and neck, then his chest, back, and stomach. Each transformation brought a fresh surge of pain, but it barely registered on his stunned mind. The king was too busy contemplating the significance of what was happening to dwell on his discomfort.

  During her travels, Tithian knew, Sadira had learned that the horrid monsters called New Beasts were created by the untamed magic flowing from the Pristine Tower. If so, it seemed likely that the Dark Lens was the tool Rajaat had used to control that magic. The king reasoned that the ancient sorcerer had relied on the Way to shape the Tower’s mystic energies, then used the power of the lens to give them a physical reality. The process was not so different than that by which Tithian had bestowed Rikus’s body on himself.

  As the last pains of his change faded away, the king looked down and saw a pair of bulging thighs where his scrawny legs had been a moment before. Noting that they were even covered by the thick coppery skin of a mul, Tithian straightened his knees, thrusting the Dark Lens completely into the bag.

  No sooner had the Oracle disappeared than the satchel mouth returned to its normal size, tightening around Tithian’s new legs. Silently congratulating himself for a job well done, he tried to push the sack down over his knees so he could withdraw his feet.

  The king suddenly found his buttocks scraping across the floor. Before he realized what was happening, the satchel slipped over his hips and started up his chest. A numbing cold spread over him from breastbone down, save his feet still burned where they touched the lens. He cried out in astonishment and scratched at the floor, cutting his fingertips on the sharp edges of mica sheets.

  Despite the strength of his new body, Tithian could barely stop himself. The Dark Lens seemed to be falling, dragging him into the satchel after it. The king tried to kick away from the hot glass, but to little avail. His feet remained fused to its surface.

  Great clumps of floor tore away in Tithian’s hands, and he slipped farther into the satchel. The mouth of the bag came up past his armpits and over his head, engulfing him in a cold, formless world. The king lashed out and caught the edges of the satchel. It began to turn in on itself.

  Fighting against the tide of panic rising inside him, Tithian tried to break contact with the lens by visualizing himself standing on a granite floor. For an instant, his soles were filled with pain, and he smelled the acrid stench of charred flesh. The Oracle separated from his feet.

  Tithian instantly began to change back into the scrawny, sickly-looking ruin of a man he had been before bestowing himself
with the traits of a mul’s body. Waves of pain rolled through his limbs and torso as each group of muscles shriveled back to normal size. This time, he felt every instant of the agony acutely.

  Despite the pain, Tithian retained his grip on the satchel and endured the transformation while floating just inside the sack’s mouth. He did not feel the burden of his own weight, and no longer did he experience any sensation of up or down, sideways or forward, or even of past and present. He simply existed, connected to the outside world only by the tenuous grip of his aching fingers.

  With each passing moment, the Dark Lens appeared to grow smaller and smaller. Tithian assumed that the change in size meant it was falling away from him, but he could not be sure. In the formless gray world inside the satchel, there was nothing by which he could gauge movement or direction. The lens simply seemed to be shrinking, until it now appeared no larger than his own head.

  Even through the pain of his ongoing transformation, Tithian realized that it was not normal for an item to fall away so rapidly. Usually, he just opened his hand, and the object drifted away as if buoyed on a cloud. The king stretched out one of his hands and pictured it resting on the lens, attempting to summon the artifact in the same way he would summon any other.

  Nothing happened, save that the lens continued to fall away. A cold lump of fear formed in the pit of Tithian’s stomach. “Come to me!” he screamed.

  The lens did not stop falling. Tithian closed his eyes and visualized it resting in the palm of his hand. As he summoned the spiritual energy to use the Way, he felt himself being drawn toward it. Again, the sack began to turn in on itself, and he knew he could not continue to hold it while trying to recover the lens. He had to make a choice: release his grasp on the mouth of the satchel, or lose the Dark Lens.

  Tithian opened his hand and released the satchel.

  There was no sensation of movement, nothing drifting past in the horrible grayness to mark the passage of distance. The king knew that he moved only because the satchel opening was growing smaller and the lens was growing larger. He could not feel the air brushing his face as he slipped through it, or even whether the temperature was hot or cold. Tithian simply felt numb.

  Some time later, the king caught the Oracle. It might have been a few moments or a day that had passed; Tithian could not tell. He had no more sensation of time than he did of distance. All he knew for sure was that he struck the lens with a terrible jolt. Again, he felt a surge of fiery energy rise through his body without causing him pain, then he sat down on the lens, held fast by the mystical energy he was drawing from its depths.

  After he had re-established contact with the Oracle, the sensation of falling returned to Tithian’s stomach, and he felt a cold breeze brushing past his face. The king slowly turned, looking in all directions, trying to find some means of further orienting himself. He saw nothing but the opening from which he had come, glowing red with the sun’s light and rapidly vanishing.

  Hoping to stop the lens’s fall before the opening disappeared entirely, Tithian visualized himself as a wyvern. In his mind’s eye, he saw the long, barbed tail wrapped around the lens below, his huge leathery wings beating the air furiously in an attempt to raise himself and his cargo up to the opening.

  Energy sizzled from the lens into his body, and his back and shoulder blades burned with fierce, blistering pain. In the next moment, the stumps of a tail and two wings sprouted from his body. As the appendages steadily grew longer and larger, their roots sent long tendrils of anguish burrowing through his body. He began to shudder uncontrollably, though as much from fear that he would lose the Dark Lens—or be lost with it—as from his pain.

  Gulping down his misery and shock, Tithian waited until the agonizing transition was complete and the unbearable pain subsided. Then, making sure his tail was securely wrapped around the lens, he flapped his new wings as hard as he could. The air throbbed with each stroke, and the gray mists swirled around him like smoke on a windy day.

  The king and his lens continued to fall. He looked up and saw nothing but a crimson dot where he had hoped to see the satchel opening.

  Forgetting about his wings, Tithian leaned over the side of the Oracle and peered into the grayness below. He opened himself to the power of the lens once more and used the Way to visualize the satchel opening directly beneath himself. Again, he felt his body erupt with fiery energy. An instant later, the crimson dot appeared below the Oracle.

  “By Rajaat, yes!” Tithian cried. “If we can’t fly up to the exit, we’ll fall out of it!”

  No sooner had he spoken than the king suddenly felt as though he were beneath the Oracle instead of on top of it, and he knew he was once again falling away from his goal. As Tithian watched, the satchel opening faded from a dot to a point, then blinked out of sight altogether. He could not tell why he had failed. The lens might have changed the direction of its movement, or simply turned over so that he was looking at the exit from its bottom instead of the top. In either case, all he knew for sure was that he had been traveling toward the dot one moment, and away from it the next.

  Tithian folded his wings in despair and settled down to consider his situation, keeping his wyvern’s tail securely wrapped around the lens. The king felt ready to burst from the dozen conflicting emotions welling up inside him. An angry rush filled his ears, and never in his life had he wanted so desperately to kill someone—but who could he blame for his current troubles?

  At the same time, in his lower abdomen, an icy ball of horror grew steadily larger. After Borys had returned Sacha and Wyan to him, he had decided to store them in this satchel precisely because it seemed a difficult place from which to escape. Did the fact that they had never escaped mean that escape was impossible?

  What Tithian felt most, though, was the tangled knot of frustration snarled in his chest. He had planned every step of his journey, prepared for every contingency, and overcome every obstacle—from Agis’s pursuit to escaping the crystal pit—for what? So he could fall into his satchel and die? He could not accept that possibility, but neither did he seem able to escape it.

  The king took a long series of deep breaths, trying to calm himself, and attempted to focus his thoughts on solutions to his problem. Clearly, something about the nature of the Dark Lens made it behave differently inside the sack. Perhaps it had something to do with the nature of obsidian, the king decided. It seemed reasonable to assume the same properties that made the glassy mineral so useful to sorcerer-kings and other powerful mages might interfere with the satchel’s mystic nature.

  Tithian held out his hand and thought of one of the obsidian balls he had placed into the satchel before leaving Tyr. A black dot appeared in the grayness below, then streaked up to land in his palm in the same instant. There was nothing strange about the way it came to him.

  “It’s not the obsidian,” Tithian muttered, tossing the ball aside.

  The globe hovered in the air, lingering behind the plummeting lens and fading out of sight as quickly as it had appeared. Next, thinking the magical nature of the lens might be the problem, the king opened his hand and thought of the forked wand he had used to lead him to the Oracle in the first place. Again, it appeared instantly, then simply drifted away when he tossed it aside.

  That left only the strange red glow swimming through the surface of the lens. Perhaps the artifact’s strange energy interfered with the satchel’s magic. The king thought briefly about trying to drain it of power, hoping it would behave like an ordinary piece of obsidian, but thought better of that idea. He had no idea how long that might take, or if it could be recharged once he had done it.

  Tithian removed his black cassock, slitting the tattered shift in the back so he could pull it over his cumbersome wings. When he had finally succeeded, he spread the garment over the top of the Oracle. Holding it securely in place with his wyvern’s tail, the king reached through a sleeve to touch the hot surface of the lens itself.

  He visualized his cloak growing larger an
d darker, spreading over the entire Oracle to form a taut shroud, as impervious to energy—mystic or otherwise—as it was black. A fiery surge rose through Tithian’s hand, then passed through his body and into the tattered cassock.

  Before the king’s eyes, the many rips and tears in the cloth drew together, sealing themselves so tightly that no sign remained of them. The robe stretched at all corners, creeping over the surface of the lens until it had sealed every inch beneath a seamless cover. Even where Tithian’s tail passed through the cover, the cloth melted into his leathery hide without any visible joint.

  Tithian removed his hand from what had been the sleeve of his cassock. Once he tied it off, he lost all sensation of movement. His body began to drift, and, had it not been for his wyvern’s tail still wrapped securely around it, he would have become separated from the lens.

  Although he was relieved, the king stopped short of crying out in celebration. He had grown familiar enough with this strange place to realize that just because he had no sensation of falling did not mean he had stopped moving. He opened his fingers and thought of the extra dagger he had placed in the satchel. A beautiful bone dirk, intricately carved with the figure of a two-headed serpent, appeared in his palm. Tithian released the weapon, allowing it to drift away from his hand.

  The dagger sailed away as though he had thrown it.

  For a moment, Tithian could not quite believe what he saw. His senses told him that he was stationary, and his logic told him that after sealing the Oracle’s energy within his cloak, it should behave as did everything else in this strange place. Things weren’t happening at all as he had expected.