by James Fahy
It was a Shard of the Arcania.
“Hurry,” Tritea said. “Take it, child of the Fae. It calls to you. It yearns for you. It wants to be home. I do not have much time. This world is not my world any longer. My love awaits me in the Everafter, and I long to return to him.”
She was already fading, dissolving away from his vision like crumbling papyrus in water. The Shard pulsed and blazed. Robin felt his own mana stone reacting, burning on his chest like a vibrating, glowing coal.
He stepped towards it, the Undine now nothing but a thin sketch, an outline suspended in the air as she faded away to peaceful nothingness. He reached out his hand to claim the Shard.
His fingers tingled and burned, scorched and soothed at the same time from its raw and primal energy.
As the last trace of Tritea vanished, the last blink of her milky eyes fading into nothing, and Robin made to grab for the Shard, his wet face blazing in the rainbow light of it, a dark shape erupted from the water.
Miss Peryl, soaked and gasping, had thrown herself in through the maelstrom. Her hair flying out around her, pale hands outstretched and her wide black eyes fixed desperately on the magical object.
Robin’s fingers closed around the Shard, and at the same time, so did the fingers of the Grimm.
BROKEN PIECES
A shockwave tore through the tomb, blasting outward from the two figures as their fingers met on the Shard. As though they had completed some great electrical current.
The blast tore away the cyclone of water, sending it spraying outward in a great dissipating explosion, clouds of steam rushing up to the ceiling. It shattered and cracked several of the columns, a great wind tearing through the chamber, as icicles above exploded like fireworks, raining down a shower of glistening ice over all.
Henry was bent low over Jackalope, trying to shield the Fae with his own body. Ice fell in a glittering rain onto his back. The tomb blazed with light, and at its centre, rooted to one another and transfixed to the spot, Robin and Peryl stood facing one another, their fingers interlaced, the Shard between their palms, howling with primal energy.
The Tower of Water roared through Robin’s brain, ice through his blood, great cold depths in his lungs, all the power and majesty of the greatest tidal wave poured over his brain, engulfing him, consuming him. He couldn’t move or speak, only feel the Arcania flowing through his body, scattering his thoughts until nothing remained but power, sheer deafening power. He stared over the Shard, his eyes wide, and into the face of Miss Peryl, whose frozen and gaping expression told him she was experiencing the same.
But her eyes were not the eyes of a Grimm.
They were not black and cold. They were wide and blue and startled. They were his own eyes, staring back at him. Robin’s eyes in the girl’s face. They were linked through the Shard. And he saw from her face, that she saw her own eyes in his.
Blackness roared up from deep within him and filled Robin in an overwhelming flood. He felt things which were not his own to feel. Hatred, fear, a desperate, keening sense of loss so great it left him breathless, and he would have fallen to his knees, broken with the power of it had not the force of the Shard held him frozen in its grip.
Robin closed his eyes against the strange emotions, the blackness. Trying to shut them out. Feeling that had never been his, and with them, a flood of disjointed images came.
He saw a dark and rainy sky over a grim city, lit by night.
He heard a child crying, somewhere distant, a harrowed wail going unanswered. More images flowed unbidden through his mind’s eye. Bare rooms, a dirty mattress on the floor of what looked like an abandoned warehouse. Huddled figures gathered in an alleyway around an old trashcan which had been made into a makeshift fire, warming filthy and frozen hands in fingerless gloves.
He saw a girl, lost and dirty, wrapped in old clothes and slumped in a shop doorway, sheltering against the rain. He felt her cold, her loneliness. She was sick, dying even. And so alone. The images shifted. The same girl, standing on a bridge at night, cars and buses like ghosts behind her. She was almost invisible to the passing people of the city as she contemplated the dark water far below. The metropolis glittered around her, cold and uncaring.
Robin’s hand burned with the Shard. It glowed through this skin of his hand and Peryl’s, shaking his bones.
Again the images moved, and now he saw the child again, lying in an alley, makeshift sheets of newspaper and rags half-covering her starving, delirious form. He had never felt such hunger, the hunger of the starving. It consumed him. A car had stopped at the mouth of the alleyway. Sleek and black. Like none this child had ever seen before, certainly not here in her world. It was out of place, a limousine at the mouth of the filthy alleyway, framed by overflowing dumpsters.
Through her hazy, delirious eyes, Robin saw a man, tall and thin, crisply dressed, walking into the alley through the rain. His face was hidden in shadow, beneath a wide black umbrella, but he bent and spoke with the girl. She tried to ignore the stranger, she wanted to sleep, just to sleep and never wake up. A coldness rolled from him, a wrongness. But he spoke with her. And after a time, too weak to argue, she nodded.
The images shifted again, and now she was being carried in the arms of the strange thin man. Surprisingly gentle, but his long white fingers gripped her limp and sickly form tightly. She was placed in the back of the car. It smelled of leather and warmth, and a deep, rich perfume. In the back seat of the great car, where the man left her, returning to the wheel, the girl wearily lay her head in someone’s lap, soft and comforting, and a gentle hand stroked her wet hair from her face. Muttered murmurs. It would be alright now.
Robin saw through the girl’s eyes, through the hazy image, no face of this passenger, but a pair of eyes, in the darkness of the tinted windows, large and almond shaped, and as blazing and brilliant as staring into the sun.
She would not die. She was home.
The blackness rolled up and swallowed him as the girl in the car lost consciousness.
Robin’s eyes shot open, reeling as he stared around. He was in the tomb, still facing the Grimm, still frozen in this moment of power, as the Arcania flowed and rushed around them both, blending them together, bleeding their thoughts into one another.
Her eyes were her own again. Whatever she was seeing, she looked horrified.
The part of Robin which seemed to instinctively understand the Arcania, Puck, had reared up and taken control. With a simple decision, he allowed the power in and the connection broke. Robin and Miss Peryl stumbled back from one another. The Shard of the Arcania, solidified at last into a long diamond-shaped spike of flickering hues, broke cleanly in two with an echoing snap.
Robin looked down at his hand, at his half of the Shard. He felt all the power of the oceans, all the yearning ache of the storms flowing through him. In wonder, speechless, he stared up at Peryl.
She was staring back, her own half of the Shard gripped so tightly in her hand that small ribbons of blood were running between her knuckles.
“What are you?” he whispered, his voice flowing from his mouth like the sound of the ocean in a shell.
The power of the Arcania flowed through her too, he saw. She was as filled with it as him, overflowing with its energy. With surprise, he saw her cheeks were wet with tears.
“How … dare you,” she whispered shakily. “How dare you show me that.”
“Show you what?” Robin asked. He had no idea what Peryl had seen when their hands had met on the Shard. He had been too lost in his own confusing whirl of images.
“Your … your … feelings,” she said through gritted teeth, as though it were a dirty word. “Your grief, your love … your humanity. Get it out of me! I don’t want it!”
“I don’t understand,” Robin replied, honestly, shaking his head in confusion.
He was aware that the light was fading, the crumbling towers holding up the roof around them were falling one by one, powdered ice, as though in slow motion. Cracks
were appearing in the floor and the high arched ceiling was groaning and creaking above them. The drowned tomb, relieved finally of the Shard, empty of the power of Tritea, was collapsing.
“How dare you make me feel,” she spat, shakily. Her face was a horrified grimace. She stared beyond Robin, seeming to notice Henry and Jackalope for the very first time. The frozen floor around the wounded Fae was rosy pink where his blood had stained it, seeping into the ice. Her hand flew to her mouth, horrified, and she shook her head wildly. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t want to face this.”
Robin watched as she crossed to the two boys, blazing with the energy of the Shard. The icy floor groaned and creaked under her footsteps, crackling with power. Henry was staring at the two of them.
“Get away from us!” Henry said angrily, his voice shaking. “He’s dead! You’ve done enough damage, okay?”
Robin stared out from the small corner of his mind that was still himself. The one part of him not consumed by the euphoria of the Shard.
Jackalope was dead? He certainly looked white as marble. His eyes were closed and he was as still as the ice he lay on. It was their fault he was even here. If he hadn’t helped them in the snow … he’d still be alive.
The majority of Robin, however, watched impassively. Puck was concerned only with Peryl and with her half of the Shard, which she still gripped as she walked towards the two boys. Her white skin looked glassy, infused with Shard-energy, and Robin stared down at his own hands. They were the same. Slightly translucent, as though he were some half-Undine crossbreed. He could see his veins, through which he felt the power of the Tower of Water rush ceaselessly. At his feet, in the shining ice, he saw his own reflection staring up at him. He was pale, his eyes a bright and shining green, and his blonde hair now as white as snow. From either side of his head there sprouted long antlers, crowning his head, noble and surreal. They were fashioned of solid white ice and they caught the light like diamonds.
“Leave him, human boy,” he heard Peryl say. She sounded weary and shaky, her voice filled with pain. She waved a hand and Henry skittered away on the ice in a hail of frost.
Robin reached out a hand and caught his friend from afar before he hit the wall with a cushion of pure frozen mana.
The great high ceiling of the tomb cracked further and water now rained down on them all, freezing and fast. Nearer the doors, larger cracks had appeared, and the lake was gushing into the large space. Soon, it would be flooded. They had to leave. Immediately.
Peryl was crouched over Jackalope, ignoring the crumbling tomb around them. Her face was unreadable. She moved his wet hair from his forehead, staring down at him curiously, as though she had never seen such a creature before.
“Henry, to me,” Robin said in the voice of Puck. He saw Henry pick himself up. He had lost his bow. The boy staggered over to Robin across the rapidly flooding floor. The water was already ankle-high, and he sloshed through it, shivering, staring at Robin.
“We have to get out,” Henry said, chattering in the cold. “This place is coming down. Robin? Are you Robin or not?” He was looking at the Puck worriedly.
“I am always Robin,” he replied simply. He opened his hand, showing Henry the Shard, snapped clean in half. “We have what we need.”
Henry stared at Peryl in confusion. “Jackalope,” he said, his teeth chattering as the icy water rose around them. Another pillar fell, and more icicles rained down like spears into the water around them. “I know he was a turncoat, but—”
“This is a tomb,” Robin replied. “It is the right place … for things so lost.”
Peryl looked up at him. There was another resounding and thunderous crack above their heads, and water began to gush down in great torrents from above. Henry shielded his head, but Robin merely raised his arm above his horns, and the deluge split and flowed harmlessly around them.
He looked at the Grimm with his glittering green eyes, and she stared back, seeing the Scion for the first time for what he was.
“You can come with us,” he said to her. “If you choose to.”
She didn’t reply for a moment, and then, slowly, she smiled bitterly. “No. I can’t,” she said. “There’s no going back from where I’ve been. I will take care of myself.” Still crouched over Jackalope, she opened her hand and looked down to the broken Shard she held. “Half a prize is better than none.”
Robin nodded. “As you wish.” He glanced at Henry. “Hold on to me.”
Henry gripped Robin’s outstretched arm. “But – she has half of the Shard,” he said. His words were almost lost in the roar of water flooding into the tomb. The walls creaked and buckled. The last of the icy pillars fell and toppled landing in the rising water with a resounding splash.
“Yes, she does,” Puck replied. “And I have the other. It is enough. To turn Ker’s army, to save Hiernarbos.” He waved a hand in the air, and a small wave sprung up, carrying something small and dark across the water’s surface to his feet. Henry grabbed it. It was the small locked box from Nightshade’s tomb.
“And we have other spoils.”
He turned to look at Peryl again, but at that moment the ceiling collapsed utterly. The lake, in a roaring, all-engulfing tide, crashed in on top of them, obliterating the scene, washing Peryl and Jackalope from view
BOONS AND BOXES
Henry later remembered only confusion and rushing motion. The roar of water all around, being lifted from his feet, and soaring through a chaotic, primordial space at great speed, upwards and upwards in an air bubble formed of pure will. He clung to Robin’s outstretched arm for dear life, eyes squeezed shut and the locked box held tightly to his chest with his free arm. The roar of the water was deafening. The darkness and cold absolute. And then, with a mighty explosion of foam, they were out, fresh air whipping past their faces, sunlight blazing on his closed eyelids as they shed water, still soaring upwards, into the sky.
Henry opened his eyes, and saw that they were above the lake, its surface receding beneath them as they flew, choppy and glinting in the sun. He stared at Robin, or Puck, or whoever the Scion currently was. The boy’s face was set and stern, alien and glowing with power. Green eyes, icy horns, and from his back there sprouted two enormous wings, shimmering, perfectly formed and clear as crystal. The Waterwings cantrip, expertly mastered. The ice from which they were formed ground together, a chorus of knives as they beat, and the two boys soared towards the distant shore.
Henry found himself actually giggling with pure nerves.
“What is it?” Robin asked, as they swooped low over the shore, wind whipping through their wet hair. His voice was the ocean crashing against cliffs.
“I always joked … you fairies should have wings,” Henry said, through cold chattering teeth.
Robin grinned.
They landed on the bank, and Robin stumbled a little as Henry let go. The power of the Shard was already leaving him. But it was more than that, there was something mixed up in it, like a cocktail. The snapped Shard. The power broken and shared. He was still feeling some of Peryl’s emotions, still remembering things he should have no memory of. It made him dizzy, and a little nauseous.
They had landed some way around the lake from the tourist centre, in a secluded and private spot, ringed by trees. There was, thankfully, no one around. The sun still beat down on them, and Robin wondered absently to himself if anyone had seen them erupt from the lake, fleeting spirits of ice. If so, they would probably be added to the local legends.
“Robin, look.” Henry pointed out. Back across the lake, something else had erupted from the surface, tiny at this distance. They watched as the shape soared up high into the sky, icy wings glittering in the light. It sped away, over the hills away from them and was lost from sight.
“Peryl,” Robin said. His Waterwings were melting. He could feel the strange horns of ice dissolving too, tiny crystals floating upwards from his head and dissipating in the warm air. “The Shard, our half of it. We need to get it to Hi
ernarbos,” he said unsteadily. “It can power the valley, it can repel the Grimms, and turn back the army, I know it can.”
“Rob? Are you going to faint? You don’t look too clever,” Henry gripped the Fae’s elbow for support.
“We need … we need help,” Robin said, feeling his legs collapse under him. Henry lowered him down onto the grass. “You look really weird. One of your eyes is blue and the other one’s green.” Henry pushed something into Robin’s hand.
Robin looked down. A small round stone. His boon. He’d never used it. Henry had saved it in the tomb. He must have found it when Robin had been sucked into the water-whirlwind.
“What would I do without you, eh?” he said dizzily to the older boy. He gripped the stone tightly. “We need … help,” he said clearly. Nausea overtook him, and he lay back on the grass, staring unseeing up into the trees.
The sky beyond was high and blue. He felt the stone disappear from beneath his fingers, melting away into nothingness as Henry’s had.
A moment later, a face appeared in his field of vision, staring down at him with the tiniest frown of curiosity. A woman with long pale hair, strikingly pretty and looking rather unfocussed. She was silhouetted against the sky.
“Calypso?” Robin said. He heard Henry talking too, but his voice was strangely distorted, as though coming from the bottom of a deep well, and the nymph disappeared from his field of vision. Robin was too weak to stand or care. A high ringing noise was building in his ears. He was either going to throw up or to pass out.
Calypso reappeared. “Scion,” she said, snapping her fingers to get his attention. “My student. The Shard. Your fragment. You must give it to me.”
Robin felt incredibly sleepy. He thought of Jackalope’s foolish betrayal, fuelled by fear. “You … used to work for her … for Eris…” he said, feeling half-drunk as the power of the Shard drained out of him.