The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

  The horses greeted them first, and Iyana’s heart nearly broke all over again when she saw Creyath’s black charger led out to soak up the last rays of the dying sun. Its chestnut eyes looked beyond the horizon. Iyana touched the beast, and in the place of agitation and complaint she felt its pain as a sharp thing that would fade with time.

  The merchants were glad to see them, and Captain Talmir was surprised to see them, and perhaps a touch annoyed that they had not fled south toward the temporary shelter provided by the Valley peaks.

  “How did you know we’d be back?” the captain asked Stav as the two worked to rearrange the stones around the fire pit on the shore of the glittering lake below.

  “Didn’t,” Stav said, and Iyana laughed once at that and then again, louder and longer at Talmir’s fresh look of anger.

  “It worked out,” Karin said, resting in an alcove tucked beneath the spiral stair, eyes closed and head lolling. “Best as could be expected, given the mix of Sages, Sentinels and the odd Night Lord.”

  Talmir had been striking flint to light the kindling in the ring of stones. He stopped as Karin finished, his eyes glazing over. Ceth and the others had offered to bury Creyath and Nica with those they had lost, but Talmir insisted on bringing them back south, to the Valley that was never meant to be their home and now could never be anything but.

  None spared glances at the wrapped bundles they had brought back. Iyana didn’t think it was the grief that kept them from it, but rather the knowing that Creyath, Sen, Nica and the red- and gray-sashes that had lost their lives were not defined by the forms they left behind.

  Iyana hadn’t noticed she was standing still, watching the children rush past as if nothing had changed, their minders following their progress with tired and—she thought—happy expressions, until Talmir addressed her.

  “We’ll stay a few days, Iyana,” he said. “Take your rest.”

  She nodded absently and went to do just that, only her tired, aching feet did not take her to one of the quieter chambers but rather through the shallows of the lake and into the darker tunnels the children used to frighten one another. As she walked, she tried not to think of the Pale Men that had chased her through these very halls, reaching with their white hands and terrible black claws.

  She thought of Pevah as she came to the end of the line and stepped down into his thinking place. She smiled at the Everwood tree, which seemed to glow with a soft yellow light, the motes of dust swirling around it the only company it might have for a while yet. Not so long in the memory of such a thing. A memory that might have begun before Pevah made these lands and people his own. A memory that included all the voices that had filled these halls for centuries and then passed on. A memory of the World, and all the great and small happenings in it.

  The thought jogged a new one, and despite her exhaustion and the dull aching of a heart that had yet to embrace its need to grieve, Iyana gave in to the rising curiosity.

  She approached the Everwood tree, stepping gingerly over its snake-like roots and moving beneath the spindly, reaching branches—branches that had pulled her back from the cave of the Blood Seers when she had drifted too far and too fast.

  She sat on the same curved nest of trunk Pevah had when first they spoke at length, and she rested a hand on the heart of the stem. She breathed in and closed her eyes, willing something to happen. Some communion. Some sentience.

  But the Everwood tree was silent. Iyana sighed and was about to withdraw her hand when she felt something. She quirked her head as if listening, and there, in the deepest dark, she saw a faint flutter that could have been light, or an infant’s beating heart.

  As she focused in, the pulsing grew until she felt it in her fingertips. It was warm and it changed until it beat in time with her heart, and Iyana began to sway, feeling that strange familiarity as the Between stole away the World and all her sense of it.

  Only she was not alone. She did not soar on airy currents between Worlds, but rather found herself in darkness that didn’t frighten her so much. She was not alone. She was in the heart of the Everwood tree, or else its mind. She had been invited.

  “Hello?” she asked. There was no immediate answer. “What is it you wish me to see?”

  No answer.

  “What is it you’ve seen?”

  It seemed the Everwood tree had a literal mind. Where before it had ignored her, or considered her in silence, now it showed her what she asked. Had she been made of weaker stuff, it might have driven her mad.

  She saw time as a construct; fluid and moving in a way she could never explain again once the vision faded. She saw a vast ocean that stretched and fell below the horizon, and knew these deserts were once its floor. She saw the red cliffs dotted with growth, thorny trees and bright fruits and lanky beasts moving among them. She saw the sprawling forested plateau of Center, and the misty wetlands to the southeast she would never go. She saw the land rise on a series of steps that could each contain nations to the northeast, where great citadels rose out of the bare rock.

  There were men and women and children of all colors and persuasions, in all lands and in all times. Some reminded her of the Valley Faey, of herself, and some she guessed to be very old reminded her of the form the Eastern Dark had taken near the end. They were beautiful. Proud. She saw the beginnings of the doom that would befall them as one fed his need to know all things. His need to see them.

  And then she saw the World Apart. It was not so frightening as it had been before. Now, she saw it as if from a great distance, as if looking through a clear pool at a shimmering reflection. She saw it not as another place, but as a shadow of this one, and as the Everwood tree held her back and kept her from crossing that threshold of black and stars, she felt its knowing that the worst was yet to come.

  She felt eyes on her that recalled the purple star of the Night Lord Creyath had slain and been slain by. She saw legions of Sentinels and knew that the vain words men of the World had attached to them were nothing close to the truth. She saw leaders and nobles, kings and queens, captains and courtiers. She saw a World desperate to take their own, and fill its light with their darkness.

  And she saw the bright pillars drawing them here, linking them inextricably to the World they had always drifted close enough to touch, but never close enough to keep. She saw a great battle in the north, where fire and ice clashed and lightning washed it all with a blinding, righteous fury. She saw mountains crack and heard the war she could not see as the battle for the World went on below. The first of many as the denizens of the World Apart made for all the lands men kept.

  Last, she saw the Valley. She saw Hearth glittering like a bit of clay-crusted quartz in its emerald field, and south, she saw the jewel that was the Last Lake with its black spires and distant mountains, and the village that nested on its shore like a bed of mussels.

  Iyana heard a voice calling and opened her eyes. She did not know how long she had lingered, or how long the Everwood tree had kept her, but the light was less than it had been before. She exhaled, her chest aching and easing as if she hadn’t done so in hours. She gazed up at the black branches and nodded, once.

  “I think I understand,” she said. The silence felt like answer.

  She expected to see Karin rounding the bend, or perhaps Captain Talmir. Maybe Ket, come to see why she’d wandered. She felt a pang for his missing hand and pushed it aside, knowing he had been luckier than some.

  It was Ceth, the Knight of the West and the last of his kind. He entered the chamber with some speed, his look of worry dropping as soon as he saw her, to be replaced with that stoic mask she had come to know in so short a time that felt like ages.

  She smiled at him, knowing why he hid the first look. After a time, he smiled back.

  He stepped down and switched his gaze from her to the tree she sat beneath.

  “It never spoke to me,” he said, shaking his head slowly. He didn’t sound bitter. “Come to think of it, it never spoke to Pevah either, though
he wished it would. I think it might have, long ago. Long before …” He dropped it and Iyana let it fall.

  He looked at her with such bare grief she couldn’t help but share it. She thought to reach out and smooth his hurt away with her greenfire, but some wounds were meant to linger. To be felt.

  They sat and stood in silence for a time, watching the golden motes turn amber in the dusk light.

  “You will go,” Ceth said, or asked. Iyana nodded and smiled softly. He nodded back, but it was short and sharp. He regarded her as if he wanted to say more.

  “I would say there is nothing for you and yours here, Ceth,” she said. “But I know what home is, and I know the Valley is ours.” She looked back up at the branches of the tree. “I know what’s coming, and we’ve few fires left to beat back the growing dark.”

  “This place was never home,” Ceth said, letting a hint of the bitterness in he had kept back before. “Not really.”

  “Perhaps you can make another,” she said. “You and the children.”

  “What of the desert foxes?” he asked, and she had to study his face to know that he was joking. Still, he hadn’t said no.

  Iyana told herself she wanted him and his to come so they would be safe. She told herself Ceth would prove a valuable ally to the Embers of the Valley, to Hearth or Last Lake, or whichever of the Scattered Villages he made his home.

  “You think your champions in the east will stop him? Will stop the Eastern Dark?” Ceth asked.

  “I’m not sure they’re meant to,” Iyana said, keeping the second part to herself. The part that said Ray Valour was right. The part that hoped Kole and Linn would listen to him before striking him down.

  “The Valley will be safe?”

  “It never has been,” she sighed and then smiled. It seemed to confuse him. “But it’s home, Ceth. It’s the home we’ve chosen, and the one we’ll keep.”

  “There are few Embers left to protect it,” he reasoned.

  “True,” she said, her eyes tracing the oiled bark back down onto the obsidian floor, following the trails until she lost them to the dark. “But there are more flames than them in the Valley. More fires than red.”

  Ceth nodded though he did not understand. He hadn’t moved closer to her, but he felt it. She thought to say something and gave it up, leaning back against the trunk and feeling the weight drop away that was made of worries better served for tomorrow.

  The desert foxes took up their song above, and while it was a mournful melody that made her cry, she felt grateful to hear it, and in such company.

  STEVEN is a fighter turned writer who resides in the Boston area. He wishes all disputes were still settled with a friendly game of hand-to-hand combat, is a fan of awesome things, and tries to write books he’d want to read. He hopes you like them.

  You can find him and his musings at his official web site…

  STEVENKELLIHER.COM

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