by Janny Wurts
He drifted, unfurled, for a timeless age, or perhaps for one magnified instant, unbounded as a raindrop melded into the greater expanse of the ocean. Existence dissolved, until death itself promised the blessed relief of a reawakening. And still, he held, beyond count of endurance.
Spontaneously, without forewarning, an inversion flipped his perception.
Enervated anaesthesia burst into a dizzy explosion of colour and sound. The transition did not restore the full range of orientation. Arithon regained the awareness of breath, but no heart-beat. As he recouped the displaced thread of his mage-sense, the eerie suspension of mortal flesh and bone opened into the more familiar sensation induced by a spiritwalk. A lush glen surrounded by forest embraced him, pewter with dew under starlight. But the terrain that cushioned his barefoot step was other, born of an eldritch loveliness beyond the natural world.
Caution froze him in place. As if careless movement might rend the veil of a fragile illusion, he surveyed the preternatural terrain around him with resharpened focus. Meadow grass licked his ankles, glass cool. Each blade was formed with surreal perfection, just as his skin seemed remade without scars, reborn into glowing health. Tiny wildflowers scattered the turf like dropped snowflakes, shivered by the delicate wing-beats of moths, iridescently pale green and azure. Taken by wonder, Arithon stared at a silver wolf, curled in unruffled repose. Other wild creatures sheltered nearby, unconcerned by the predator’s proximity.
Arithon counted the browsing form of a tined buck, then three does, undisturbed by the black-and-gold leopard draped on a limb overhead. The wild cat’s fixated gaze held no threat, despite an intelligence, fiercely aware and unfathomable.
Beneath the cat’s perch, a spring burbled over the stones of a pool, sheened like moonstone in the gloaming. A black-barred owl glided over a foraging mouse, while a hare and a tortoise grazed, just as peacefully oblivious. The fragrant breeze fingered Arithon’s hair, rich with the resin of pine, and green oak, and pungent with flowering witch hazel.
Yet solid appearances here were deceptive. Like the altered signature of a grimward, Arithon knew he walked through a vision derived from a singular consciousness. The interface was similarly reactive, in form and feature subject to change by the influence of a thought.
However, this waking state of volatile subjectivity did not spring from the mind of a dragon, living or dead. Whatever drove the transient reality, the sweeping prickle raised by another presence suggested that Arithon was no longer alone.
A striking woman emerged from the wood. She was dark, her lean flesh moulded on bone like the Biedar, but without their rough-spun, goat-hair garments. Clad in flowing white, and hazed in the pale gold of an exalted aura, she was ally, not enemy: joy infused her presence, pristine as the water welling from the spring.
The purity of her aspect demanded a master’s respect. Arithon bowed his head in startled homage, distrust refigured by courtesy. “Forgive me. If I’ve inadvertently trespassed, is it permissible to ask ignorant questions?”
Her smile charged him to delight. “I am here for that purpose. Nor have you imposed.” Her narrow hand gestured. “You behold the reflection of your true self, the manifest analogue spun in symbol and form from the deepest core of your being.” Flawless in composure, she seated herself on a stone, materialized in the grass at his feet.
Arithon knelt. Gently testing, he ruffled the silky fur of the wolf. When the animal leaned into his brazen caress, he regarded the woman, eyes level. “You suggest I’m hallucinating?”
Her amusement danced with the tumbling water. “No. You have not lost your way, or abandoned yourself to indiscipline. Quite the contrary.”
The wolf yawned and rolled over, content to be stroked on its belly. Arithon sat on the greensward and obliged, the taut muscle under his touch proof enough its quiescence was dangerous. “Explain, if you will. I was trapped. Apparently beyond recourse, until the aspect confining me shifted. You suggest I’ve driven my consciousness inward?”
The lady’s brown eyes regarded him, tender. Her raised finger acknowledged the diamonds, sprung from nowhere, like a diadem of glittering stars netted over her ebony hair. “Your gallantry adorns me?”
Arithon laughed. “Indulge my presumption, that comes empty-handed. I’ve been stranded adrift for too long.”
“But not powerless,” the adept admonished. “In fact, you were imprisoned in formlessness, enforced by a wrongful use of the creative force derived from the mysteries. You did not suffocate, or go mad, because you embraced absolute quietude. That perfected intent matched the bias of the ward, which surrounded you with a locked field of inertia. When you blended at one with that featureless state, the nexus of your true awareness bled into the barrier and slipped through. You have accessed the living web of our sanctuary, virgin power streamed intact from the everlasting by Ath’s adepts.”
Arithon took signal pause to reflect. “You are not,” he said presently, “allied with the shamans of Ettinmere Settlement.”
“They are descended from our sorrowfully fallen.” Her bitter-sweet sadness underscored the bright, minor trill of a nightjar. “What power they wield in corruption is finite, severed from the prime source.”
“Yet their forceful reach apparently still commands strength enough to ensnare me,” Arithon mused. “What else?”
The adept answered directly. “The resonant peace of the hostel, before this, once quelled the lane currents driving the volatile flux in the Storlains. A reservoir mighty enough, then and now, to stabilize the region’s fractured fault-lines.”
The sprawled wolf sprang erect, bristled in reflected response to Arithon’s temper. He muzzled his flared outrage. The animal settled short of a snarl, ruff soothed in response. More carefully, Rathain’s prince pursued his deferent inquiry. “White adepts don’t interfere with the world’s ways. They deny freedom to nothing living. Without imposition on your moral code, what are my ethical choices?”
The adept’s reserve shattered into a smile. “Fate’s forger, you are, and beautifully taught, with the generous heart of your forebears. By your measure this moment, two paths lie before you. The first, and the safest, invites you to step into the pool. The act will immerse your being in the prime chord. A passage of total surrender will then uplift you to dissolution. Subject to the greater law of Ath’s mercy, every binding the shamans laid on you releases. Claim divine transformation, and I may lend you my escort, either to an exalted crossing beyond the veil, or through one of several etheric gateways that intersects with Athera. The nearest hostel kept under our aegis is located at Spire.”
Arithon regarded her shimmering calm, deceptive strength and fathomless wisdom tempered by the harmony of the infinite. “If I commit myself, what becomes of my mortal form, left at large with the Ettinmere shamans?”
“They would find themselves empty-handed, bequeathed a dead husk.” Her lifted finger stayed premature speech. “Or,” she qualified, “the light of the prime source would transmute everything that you are. Your subsequent preferences then must be honoured, whether or not to return incarnate. You might emerge whole, both spirit and flesh reintegrated at Spire’s hostel. Therein lies no surety. For none who pass through the crucible remain of the body, unchanged.”
“I’d win free of the Ettinmere cabal, either way,” Arithon summarized. “But by implication, their renegade practice of violation through usurped power stays unchecked. Your adepts receive no due redress.”
She inclined her head.
Which aggrieved gesture clenched Arithon’s fists. The silver wolf rumbled a growl, as he said, “Then give me the passage that’s not guaranteed. My way takes the path to defeat the cabal’s warped domination.”
“You would serve the balance at risk to yourself?” The adept arose like poured moonlight, her luminous aura studded by the flitter of displaced moths. “Then take my hand. Release thought and emotion until your awareness is emptied, and this construct collapses back into the void. If you recross
the barrier whence you came, my presence, through yours, can enable a restored connection to the prime chord. A balance shall be re-established thereby, that no wayward faction may tame.”
Arithon stood also, his clasp laced through hers with anticipation. “Then by all means, let’s raise mayhem and convulse the Ettinmere cabal with seizures.”
“They’ll suffer no harm,” the adept amended in response to his sardonic humour. “Though if your sacrifice allows our adepts to reclaim their stolen sanctuary, be warned. By the restored tenets of Ath’s order, all constraints would be forfeit. Anything binding the body and every etheric stay on the spirit disbands in our presence forthwith. You will be awakened, set free on your merits. But we may not intercede between you and your enemies or act in your personal defence.”
Arithon smiled, all teeth. “For sweet satisfaction, leave that part to me.”
A sunburst blast of light and gusty wind restored Arithon’s natural senses. His reflexive move to shield flash-blinded eyes wrenched his bound wrists, currently roped over his head and abraded to weeping sores. He dangled in darkness, stretched against a stout post. Hard upon that unpleasant assessment, his restraints succumbed to the dominion reasserted by Ath’s adepts. Shredded knots pattered over his naked skin. Dropped onto jellied legs in abrupt release, Arithon buckled to his knees. Agony seized the mauled muscles held cranked under strain for too long. Desperation spurred his fight to regroup.
Resinous smoke from an extinguished torch swirled on the cross-draught, tainted by human sweat and the rancid cloy of clay body paint. Surprised disarray gripped the shamans surrounding him, fanned by the whumping beat of panicked wings. Distraught handlers blundered to recapture their birds, cut loose inside a wicker enclosure.
Stars gleamed through the chinks. The hour neared midnight. Terror needed no talent to grasp the ritual setting for a ceremonial dismemberment. Galvanic rage drove Arithon erect. How narrowly he had escaped the horror of having his eyes plucked by buzzards!
A shadow lunged for him. Steel flashed. He ducked the cleaver swiped at his neck, and followed up with a knee to the belly that folded his Ettin assailant. He stamped on the man’s wrist, kicked away the dropped blade, then charged through the clouting gamut of distempered vultures. Human hands snatched at him. He clubbed off their fumbling, chopped away other fingers that seized his hair. A knife licked at his side and cleanly missed. Arithon parried the next thrust, caught the wielder’s forearm and savagely twisted before the reverse slash eviscerated him. Rammed onwards through battering chaos, he realized: the cabal was not just disempowered, but blinded, utterly stripped of their mage talent. Before they sorted out their confusion, or someone struck a spark to a torch, Arithon lashed punches at all that moved. Ploughed into the flimsy wall of the enclosure, he rammed the dry palings and shouldered through, raked by splintered basketry.
Fresh air bathed his face. The moonless glimmer of summer starlight unveiled the setting, a barren, volcanic mound centred inside the rimmed bowl of a dormant caldera. Evergreens clothed the slope beyond the outer rim. Their saw-toothed tops notched the seamed crevice of a vast, sheer-sided ravine, cleft through the central Storlains. The icy flanks of the peaks framed the site in a vista of jagged foil and rock. Majesty stole Arithon’s breath, beyond regard for his urgent straits.
Nor was he alone. Twelve adepts in pearlescent robes surrounded the shamans’ enclave. The crude structure of board palings and woven osiers was roofed in stretched canvas, painted over with eldritch symbols. Black bindings and spellcraft laced the hard-scrabble ground of chipped lava, where trapped power coiled beneath reverberated with a potency fit to club Arithon prostrate.
A containment already tearing asunder, he realized, shuddered by the crackling dissonance as Ath’s adepts reclaimed their usurped sovereignty. Forces chained into stasis strained towards explosive release, the unravelling stays a wisped net billowed over the titanic seethe of a geyser.
The eruption shook the air and the earth, as the pressurized flow of pooled power burst from the reservoir sealed beneath Ettin. Light blazed, the unbridled blast of chaos caught short, then tamed, rejoined to the prime source after stagnant centuries of severance.
The shift afflicted more than the deposed cabal. Freed current rushed through the ground underfoot, reconnected to a gold pillar of etheric light. The reunion unfurled a cry of sweet harmony that knifed Arithon through, bone and viscera.
He faltered, undone. The scalding flood unstrung the fight in him and vaulted his spirit to ecstatic surrender. He could shed no enemy’s blood in this place: not in defilement of absolute purity, no matter whether survival relied upon self-defence. More than a fire to cauterize aggression, the upscaled change in frequency roared through his sensory perception and altered his close surroundings.
A spring gushed and burbled out of dry rock, where no watercourse had been in evidence. What seemed a murky encroachment of shadows thickened and leafed into a forest, massive trees wound with flowering vines, and soaring crowns pinpricked with starlight. The mystical transformation unfolded apace, the grace of the infinite respinning the original sanctuary’s volatile matrix. Arithon fought crippling vertigo and moved. A step ahead of pursuit by the cabal, he had to escape the thundering torrent before he lost himself into beguilement.
The ground underfoot shuddered. Arithon cried out and stumbled, caught and steadied by the presence of a pale wolf. Braced short of a fall, he pleaded for guidance. From the manifest circle of Ath’s adepts, the female initiate who had spoken within the etheric glade inclined her head in homage. Through the shimmering deluge of energy and past the iconic blaze of her aura, Arithon perceived the stubs of two posts, once the uprights for a pillared archway carved with Paravian ciphers. His path lay that way, given trust in her counsel.
Her whisper sped his flight with encouragement. “Run far and fast, blessed! Take with you always the gift of Ath’s peace for what you’ve done for our white brotherhood.”
Tanuay intercepted his sister’s return from the meadow briar patch. He hounded her heels across the summer settlement, his clipped tread up her cottage stair the drummed chorus to his badgering argument.
Vivet turned a deaf ear. Valien’s slack weight braced astride her right hip, she juggled a crockery bowl of wild strawberries in her crooked elbow, left hand freed for the string latch. Twilight shadowed her tight-lipped irritation, as she bashed the door inward.
“Grief break your rock-headed stubbornness, you’re not listening!” Embittered past fury, her brother’s tirade cracked like a rooster’s crow. “Your excuses are finished. The shamans have Arin. Condemned for unlawful desertion, by now he’s three days’ dead, cut and drawn for exposure as buzzard meat.”
Exasperation exploded, Vivet spun, burdened, upon her dark threshold. “How by Teeah’s ever bounteous milk will Herthov’s suit better my lot?” Trampling over his retort, she ranted, “He’s a clinch poop and a leering swine, with a reek to his promises like unwashed laundry. Valien’s better off growing up fatherless than curdling under that man’s sour influence.”
Tanuay jammed his foot in the door-panel her shove tried to slam in his face. “You risk a future of menial labour for the rest of your barren life.”
Vivet laughed. “I’ve sunk that low, long since. Lower, if that puckered bollocks sack imagines I’d give my consent.” Tried as the fretful squirm her toddler threatened to upset her balance, she squashed the debate. “No. The day Arin’s picked bones are thrown to the dogs, curse your whining disgrace, I’ll be going.”
“What’s happened to you?” Tanuay’s distress switched back to appeal. “Is there nothing left of the common ground binding our ties of blood kinship?”
Vivet had no words. Beneath his stiff neck and traditional clothes, she regarded the weathered, flaxen-haired stranger her older brother had become. Hardened by disappointment, his critical, lined eyes held little trace of the cherubic lad with skinned knees who had led childhood escapades to the creek. Vivet groped
for the words to soften necessity.
“Leave again, and your kin have no choice,” Tanuay threatened, mistaking her hesitation for weakness. “They’ll take Valien from you. Strike your name from the family. No reprieve, once that happens. You’ll seal your own exile.”
“Then good riddance!” Patience broke under stress. “There’s a world outside of this miserable settlement, and more kindness shown towards me and Valien by the wives of the summer traders.” Vivet kicked out her kinsman’s obstructive toe. “Unless you’re minded to help stir my jam? I’ll thank you for taking yourself elsewhere.”
The freed door thumped shut. The latch plinked. Vivet leaned against the stout plank, eyes clamped against tears. The ambitious folly that had once lured her as a runaway brought her to this bitter turning.
Tanuay, of them all, had fixed the leaks in her shingles. His passionate care brought the portions of meat, flour, and eggs, when she lost flesh from nursing her infant. If his easy laughter had gone with maturity, Ettin’s suffocating rigidity never seemed to choke his contentment. He could not comprehend: would not dream of the price she paid now, entrapped by the absolute terms of an outside order’s deadly obligation.
If anything, Arin’s demise freed the bind that shredded her conscience. Morning would bring final proof of his end. Exhausted from dawn-to-dusk toil, and scalded by lye soap and boiled linens, Vivet faced her priorities. The ungainly crock tilted, dragged awry by Valien’s weight, plump legs and dirty toes dangling. Nonetheless, she held out, until Tanuay’s stomping retreat passed beyond earshot.
“Here, Valien.” She eased the drowsy child onto his feet. “Soon we’ll have jam and cakes.” Small fingers seized her kirtled-up skirt, which gave way, tugged loose by his wobbly balance. Chortling, pleased, he sat with a thump and sucked on his sticky knuckles. Vivet ached for that innocent happiness. Knotted back straightened, she secured the filled bowl and moved on to brighten the lamp by the open window.