The Journey
By
Muffy Morrigan
©2012
Rob Emrys was thirteen when he killed his brother.
As Custodes Noctis it was his right and duty to send his brother to the Other World when mortally wounded. Rob knew that he would die shortly after, it was the way of the Custodes Noctis: the psychic bond they shared could not bear the break for long and the surviving brother would die—sometimes living long enough to avenge their brother’s death, but no more. The hereditary swords would be passed to the next generation and the line would continue. Rob hadn’t lived long enough to have been given care of one of the family’s swords—that came after he was fully trained. The fact he wasn’t old enough to have finished his training didn’t change the fact he was still Custodes Noctis and Tradition dictated his rights. He had the Gift of Sight as all younger brothers of the Custodes Noctis, in fact it was that Sight that had let him know when he was six that he and his brother would never serve together as Keepers. When the moment came for Galen to die, Rob had been prepared. He gently stopped Galen’s heart and then followed his brother into the glittering lake filled with song, the gateway to the Other World.
When Rob had been revived a few moments later, pulled from the gentle lake to the harsh light of the hospital room, his brother’s body had been removed and the hum of the bond that had been there with him since he was born was gone. His father was there, tears on his face, the dark purple aura of grief surrounding him. He had explained that Rob had been able to survive because he hadn’t started the formal training which usually finalized the bond his brother. Even though Rob had stayed in the hospital until his foster parents arrived from California, he was never left alone. When the time came, he was sent home with his foster parents. His father and uncle were still the Emrys Custodes Noctis, but they felt it would be better for Rob to make his home elsewhere. He was sure it was a mistake when he was thirteen—and the feeling would grow stronger as time passed.
Rob turned his back on his heritage at first. He was never sure if it was just grief or grief combined with anger, but he’d turned away from what he was supposed to be, trying to pretend he was a normal teenager. That didn’t last for long. Two things haunted him. First, Rob could still feel the phantom pulse of Galen’s heart against his hands—the sensation had followed him since that day in the hospital when he was thirteen. The second part was worse. His Gift of Sight was out of control. He remembered listening outside the door one day when he was fifteen while his foster mother spoke with his father and uncle. Even though Uncle Bobby had the Sight too, it was nothing like Rob’s and from what he could hear, they were worried about him—worried enough to start making trips every three months to see if they could help him. His uncle tried to show him how to control his Sight. It failed miserably, so his father—Gifted with the healing of the elder brother—had tried to help control it that way. The healing helped a little, enough so he could function most of the time. Rob wondered why they didn’t just take him home to Tacoma, but the thought was so fleeting he never asked to go back with them.
Fifteen was the decisive year.
He’d taken a job in a local used bookstore that he loved. Since he was there almost every day the owner made a deal: he could help and she would “pay” him in books. He got to spend hours with volumes he could never afford but was allowed to look through before they went into the locked rare books case. It was there he had finally let himself become, in his own heart, Custodes Noctis again. He fell in love with the Sagas of Northern Europe.
He’d bought a volume of the Saga of the Winter King, and realized it was actually a Custodes Noctis Saga. With that knowledge, he started digging more, reading all he could get his hands on. Some of the Sagas were only available in Latin, so Rob set out to learn the language. It was surprisingly easy. A little more research led him to the surprising discovery that an ability with languages was a Custodes Noctis Gift, even though there hadn’t been a record of someone with that particular Gift for centuries. He was curious if it really was one of his Gifts, he’d learned Old English and Spanish with ease as a child. To test his theory, Rob decided to learn a language that was completely unlike any other. He’d asked the owner of the bookstore to order him a copy of The Kelevala in Finnish and English. He mastered it so quickly it seemed like magic. One day he was staring the The Kelevala with easy-to-read modern English on one side and Finnish on the facing page, and less than a week later he was reading the Finnish as easily as the English—and realized that the translation he had wasn’t all that good. That realization led him to the beginnings of what would become a lifelong obsession—finding the Sagas in the original languages and translating them again.
It was when he was reading the Saga of the Legacy that he realized there had been a monstrous mistake in the translation. In one of the early stanzas there was a critical error in line five. A single line that changed the entire meaning of the Saga—a single line that had changed Rob’s life forever. He’d known he was one of the Custodes Noctis of the Legacy since he was a child. He’d dreamed it one night on a summer holiday when he was with Galen and their father and uncle. Rob had told Galen about the dream, about the huge dark thing hovering over him, its claws reaching for them. His fourteen-year-old brother had listened and the four of them had talked about it, but no one said the word “Legacy” even though Rob knew that’s what it was. And now he knew if there had been a proper translation of the Saga, his brother could still be alive, they could have trained together and with Galen’s power Rob’s out-of-control Gift would have been reined in before it led him to the brink of insanity.
When he was eighteen his father and uncle had been killed. Their death had resonated through the world, Rob remembered the exact moment they had died—it was like a warm light had been extinguished. When the phone rang Rob answered it, for an instant he heard someone on the other end. Someone crying softly, then the connection broke. A few minutes later, the phone rang again and his foster mother answered it. She spoke for a moment, then came to Rob to tell him that his father and uncle were dead.
From that moment he was on his own. Once again he had a fleeting urge to go to the funeral and see that they were buried according to Tradition, but the thought was gone before he could grasp a hold of it. Every now and then he would get the urge to go “home” to Tacoma, but it would die before he could act on it. Sometimes in the dark of night he wondered about that, but even that was more fleeting than a tiny wisp of a dream.
With his family gone and no longer able to make the trips to help keep Rob’s Gift under control, without his uncle to talk him through the Sight when it got so bad the world was nothing but a painful mass of swirling color, Rob’s Gift almost drove him to follow Galen into the Other World. His foster family was always supportive and they took him to see many different healers, including a local wisewoman. She did her best, but there was no way she could help control his Gift. She did say she knew someone who could, though, and handed Rob the phone number that would change his life. Billy Hernandez was a shaman, a very special shaman, she told Rob. He’d called the number before he was even out of her shop.
It was summer break from University. He was already into his junior year, but with the Gift getting so much worse, his studies had been suffering. When he called the shaman, the phone was answered with: “I’ve been expecting your call for the last three days.” Rob was on the road the next day, drove straight through and arrived to find Billy waiting by the road to give him directions to the house. As soon as Rob drove through the gate, the continual stream of light and colors muted to a soft hue. The land was still flowing with color but it wasn’t the painf
ul attack it had been outside the fence.
The shaman had helped him learn to distinguish the many colors that filled his world, and how to completely shut off the Gift if needed. Billy had introduced him to a variety of people and non-human creatures so Rob could learn how each “looked”. He didn’t have the usual care of an elder of the Custodes Noctis to teach him and Billy had stepped in to fill that role. It hadn’t only been control Billy taught him. The shaman had passed on other knowledge as well. It was there in the soft, sage-scented New Mexican desert that Rob had first Walked, leaving his body behind, wandering through other realms and finding teachers of ages long past. Their wisdom still resonated through the world, and they passed on knowledge that had been lost since antiquity.
Rob returned to University in the fall, ready to finish his studies and set out on a journey he’d seen in the fire one night at Billy’s. Europe was beckoning him. Not the “taking a year off to find myself” tour many of his fellow classmates planned, but rather following the threads of the Saga of the Legacy, among others, and visiting places he had seen in his dreams. The trip had been enlightening and he spent several months there, moving from country to country—finding lost Sagas, speaking with scholars, learning all he could. Once or twice, he received an unexpected welcome when he mentioned his name. It struck him as odd at the time, but he never pursued it—again it slipped away. Those fleeting moments still raised questions, the older he got the more he could hold onto, but even then they slipped away before he could really get a hold on them. He was beginning to think it had something to do with his brother’s death, and the Custodes Noctis. After he returned to the States to begin work on his Masters something very odd happened.
It had been a moment after he’d been in a car wreck. The memory of that incident was still in slow motion in his mind. He could see the truck crossing the median, see it coming towards him even as he attempted to get out of its way. He could still feel the airbag exploding as the truck hit him and those last moments before he lost consciousness, the overwhelming sense of disappointment that he wouldn’t survive to see the Legacy through.
Then that odd thing happened.
In the deep dark after the wreck a soft light had filled him, healing the terrible injuries, pulling him away from the edges of the Other World. After he woke, he tried to find out if someone had been there. The staff insisted no one had come into his room. Rob knew the healing of the Custodes Noctis, and while he had a small Gift of healing, he knew there was no way he could have saved himself in that situation. What was really strange was he recognized that light, he’d experienced it before. It had the same light and energy as the healing used by Galen, dead and gone, but somehow there.
Rob wasn’t sure exactly what happened, but he was convinced Galen had somehow been there. While he was in Europe he’d discovered a translation of the spell that could call dead Custodes Noctis back into service. It was part of the Formal Farewell—“Rest until you are called again”—and Rob had discovered that it was a very literal call to return. At one time Custodes Noctis led armies of the living and the dead into battle. Rob intended to call Galen back so they could finish the path they were set on ten years before. If his brother was already near the Veil between the Worlds, the return would be much easier to accomplish.
The Legacy wasn’t a myth. Rob knew he was part of it, and that knowledge coupled with the strange incident after the accident solidified his plans for his twenty-third birthday. As the day grew nearer he phoned Billy. The shaman helped him fill in some of the missing parts of the spell. Rob was still unsure how much had actually been restored, even after he had Walked and asked others about it as well. The call had not been used in centuries and no one seemed willing to give him all the pieces he needed. After two weeks with Billy, he decided that he had enough, and for the first time since he was thirteen he set out for Tacoma.
For some reason it was a difficult trip, and more than once he found that he’d turned the wrong way and was headed away from the Pacific Northwest. It was a continual fight to get there, but he finally managed to get close enough that he could smell the difference in the forest, the wet air that filled the coastal landscape.
He had a destination in mind. After a painful stop at the clearing where it had all begun ten years before, Rob set out to find a quiet spot in the forest. The ancient trees rose around him, welcoming him, and the world was alight with the soft colors of night. The light of the moon and stars touched the earth, and at one such place, he stopped. The light that swirled around the space was multi-colored, a small vortex of power in the center of the silent forest. There was a deep silence all around, even the trees had ceased to whisper in the wind. It was the time of night when even the hunters had retired to wait until the hours just before dawn. Once upon a time it had been called the dead of night—or the graveyard watch.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Rob pulled it out and glanced at the caller ID, it was Billy. “What’s up?” he asked, knowing the shaman wouldn’t call without reason.
“You’re still carrying out your plan?”
“Yes, I’m about to start, in fact.”
“Good, you need to be in Tacoma tomorrow.”
“Billy?”
“I was Walking and… You need to be there.”
“That’s the plan.”
“You have to be there, Rob. No distractions, no strange U-turns.”
“I won’t. If I get the urge again, I’ll do like last time and call you and you can make me turn around again.”
“Good plan. If I get even the tiniest hint it’s going wrong, I will call.”
“Thank you, Billy.”
“Be careful, Rob.”
“No one has called a dead Keeper in centuries. I’ll be careful,” Rob said, laughing, excitement bubbling in his chest. If the ritual worked he would see his brother again, they would fight together again. The Legacy would come to pass.
“I know you will. I hope we will meet again.”
“In this world or the Other World, we will, Billy. We’ve both seen it.”
“Yes, but remember you need to be there tomorrow.”
“I will.”
Rob broke the connection and tucked the phone back in his pocket. He put his backpack on the ground and pulled out a notebook, a bundle of herbs and a candle. He took off his bracelet—one of the marks of rank for the Custodes Noctis. His had been made for him by his brother, the soft quicksilver glow of Galen’s power still flowed through it. He set it down, lit the candle and opened the notebook. The ritual of the Formal Calling was not written down anywhere he could find, so he pieced it together. He had discovered part of it in a Latin translation of one of the Hunt Sagas, but none in the original language remained extant. That annoyed him. The Latin he copied into his notebook had notations on it, things he’d been told as Billy helped him rebuild the spell. What was worrying the shaman, Rob knew, was the fact that there were still large parts missing despite their intense work. He pushed the doubts away. It was tonight or never. Rob drew his small blade, a personal weapon and gift also from Galen, the Traditional gift between brothers when the younger began his training.
He was ready.
Carefully reciting the Latin, he followed the instructions in the ancient book as the magic built around him in a swirl of metallic color that mimicked his bracelet, copper, silver and bronze. He lost himself in the spell, his hands moving of their own accord, following the path of the ritual. He felt warmth trickle over his hand and looked down to see the bright light-filled red of blood drop onto his bracelet, the herbs and the ground. As the final words of the spell fell from his lips, he felt a huge jolt of energy flash through his body. It was enough to knock him down. He stayed there, the cold ground against his cheek, eyes closed for a long moment. Had it worked? Cautiously he opened his eyes, hoping beyond hope.
No Galen.
Rob pushed himself up. He let a little of the hard-won control he usually kept on his Gift drop away and looked aroun
d. The after-effects of the spell were there, the bright colors filling the small clearing, but no Galen. The spell had failed. He’d known there was something wrong when… What was that? He held his breath for a moment. There it was again, a soft whisper against his heart that reminded him of the long-lost bond with Galen.
“Are you here?” he asked the shadowy woods. The call of an owl answered him. “Galen?” There was no answer, but there was also no denying that whisper in his heart. Something had happened—he just wasn’t sure exactly what. Maybe that was what Billy meant. He would find his brother in Tacoma, maybe at the graveyard, maybe at the site of the Apothecary, but he knew he would find his brother’s spirit there waiting for him.
He could hardly wait to get back to his Jeep and on the road towards Tacoma. The fleeting emotions he’d experienced about his brother, the family and the city were missing, cut away from his psyche, and he felt as if a weight had been removed. He could see his path clearly before him—like a long string of lights along the road. It was something new, something that the spell had released. An excitement was building in him with the thought of going “home”. The urge to turn around and head away from the Northwest was completely gone.
“Why haven’t I thought of that?” he said to the night. He was used to talking to things that weren’t visible, so talking to himself was natural. “I haven’t even questioned that, why haven’t I gone before? Why didn’t I go when Dad and Uncle Bobby died?” Rob looked inside himself and realized there was a wall, a very carefully constructed wall deep inside him. He hadn’t been aware of it before. Something about the spell had brought it into his awareness. “And where did that come from?” Shaking his head, he picked up his things and threw them into the back of his Jeep. Maybe there would be answers tomorrow.
****
Ten years hadn’t changed Tacoma nearly as much as he thought it would. In California, where his foster parents had lived, communities changed almost daily with new strip malls and new housing going up all the time. As Rob followed the freeway around the long bend towards the City Center exit, the flag was still atop the Tacoma Dome, Mount Rainier was visible and the port with its massive cranes loomed in the distance. There was a new bridge over the Thea Foss Waterway, and it looked like downtown was going through a Renaissance. The Glass Museum jutted up beside the exit ramp. He debated for a moment, but rather than head straight towards Sixth Avenue where the Apothecary—the shop that had been home to the Emrys Custodes Noctis since they came to the Pacific Northwest—had once been, he took the other fork in the road. He followed Shuster Parkway and headed down the waterfront towards Point Defiance.
The Journey: A Custodes Noctis Story Page 1